Happy 4th!!!!!!!!

Sierra Filucci
Article Launched: 07/03/2008 10:42:23 PM PDT

Independence Day at the Provines house will look like many others - potato salad, macaroni salad, chicken - but dessert will be special.

Family patriarch Bill Provines, the last living employee of the Mount Tamalpais and Muir Woods Railway, turns 100 today, the Fourth of July.

He’s asked for yellow cake with chocolate frosting.

“I told my daughter-in-law to put one candle on the cake,” said Provines. “I didn’t want to burn the house down.”

Provines, of Novato, grew up in Mill Valley where he worked for a grocery and dry goods store, riding a horse cart up the dirt streets to deliver groceries.

“Then in July 1926 an engineer from the Mount Tamalpais railroad came to the house and wanted to know if I wanted to work in the engine,” said Provines. The railroad was built in 1896 and ran

from today’s Depot Bookstore and Cafe on Throckmorton Avenue in Mill Valley up to the summit of Mount Tam. The railroad was scrapped in 1930.

Provines was fresh out of the College of Marin, where he was one of 85 in the school’s first graduating class, when he began work as a fireman fueling the engines. He sometimes worked seven days a week.

“I enjoyed every minute of it. I never missed a chance to go up and down the railroad,” Provines said.

In between work at the railroad, Provines attended University of California at Berkeley where he graduated with a degree in economics in 1929, right smack in the Great Depression.

“Jobs were hard to get in those days,” said Provines.
Advertisement
“But an executive for an insurance company offered me a job.” He ended up at Royal Globe Insurance Company for the next 40 years.

It wasn’t until he retired 35 years ago that he started to relive his railroad days. He and his son Doug, who worked for the postal service, would visit Our Lady of Mt. Carmel School in Mill Valley, where Doug’s kids attended, to talk about the history of the railroad.

“We’d go to the school once a year,” said Doug, “and he’d talk about the railroad and take the kids part way up the old railroad track. This is when he really started getting into it.”

Since then, he’s gone to several events celebrating the history of the railroad, including the 1983 release of the book “The Crookedest Railroad in the World” by Ted Wurm and Al Graves, which documented the history of the track that included 281 curves.

On Thursday, Provines got a haircut at Russ’ Barber Shop in Mill Valley, where he’s been going for nearly 40 years. He wanted to look “prim and proper” for his birthday party, said friend and fellow railroad enthusiast Fred Runner, 51.

“His body isn’t as rugged as it used to be,” said Runner. “He’s stooped over a bit, but when he shakes your hand, it’s like a 20-year-old.”

“The Provines’ longevity tends to be as good as it gets,” said Russ Kerr, Provines’ barber, recalling his customer’s three sisters who all lived into their 90s.

Provines says he has no secrets to long life. “I’ve broken all the rules,” he said with a laugh.

“I’m just an ordinary person. I just take things as they come. I don’t claim to have all the answers.”

And what do you get for a “devout Catholic” man turning 100?

A framed papal blessing from the pope, says his family.

Contact Sierra Filucci via e-mail at sfilucci@marinij.com

Staff Report
Article Launched: 06/29/2008 12:02:36 AM PDT

SUBURBAN AMERICA may finally have reached the day when the cost of gasoline makes traveling by single passenger auto financially prohibitive.

The problem is that we have put ourselves in a box with few alternatives. Electric-powered cars and readily available affordable biofuels are decades away and there’s only an inadequate transit network to pick up the slack.

Like most suburbs, the North Bay built its public transit for those too old, sick or poor to drive; the so-called “transit dependent.” With the exception of Golden Gate’s well-conceived bus and ferry commute to San Francisco’s Financial District, local bus service was never envisioned to provide Sonoma and Marin residents with a practical way to travel within or between the two counties.

The truth is you generally can’t get from here to there by bus and when you can, it’s inconvenient.

Even if auto commuters decide en masse to convert to transit, there isn’t capacity to carry them. The current scheme was built to transport a relatively small number of riders. While current buses and ferries can handle a few more passengers, neither Golden Gate, Sonoma nor Marin Transit is prepared for a major influx of patronage.

I had thought that the one valid objection to building SMART (Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit) was that potential ridership would be insufficient to justify its cost. Foolish me. Now, the concern is whether SMART will have sufficient capacity to meet demand in a world of $5-$6- or even $7-gas.

Unfortunately, Americans were so welded to their auto-centered lifestyle that they trusted the Bush administration to get us out of this hole with promises of cheap Middle East oil. As a result, we have frittered away eight years with nary a step taken to devise alternatives.

Funding new methods of mobility or technological innovation will be the major quandary. There was a time when we could have imposed a gas surcharge to pay for these internal improvements.

Instead, we thoughtlessly allowed the money generated by the four-fold petroleum price increase to fund Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. We ended up using the cash to sustain tyrants rather than preparing us for a petro-doomsday.

Don’t think Barack Obama will turn this mess around in a nanosecond. It will take a decade to bring any meaningful solution to fruition.

North Bay leaders now need to do their part extricating us from this morass by devising a midrange transit strategy designed to get average folks conveniently to jobs, schools and shops.

That was Golden Gate Transit’s mission in the early 1970s, when it went into the transbay bus and ferry business. SMART is part of the solution, but by no means the entire answer.

Now, with oil at $140 per barrel, we must bring in experts to draft a workable scenario to move us within and between Marin and Sonoma without being tied exclusively to the gas guzzler.

Told you so. So again, what’s the point of not realigning Richardson Grove? The Heraldo group idea of opposing the realignment of Richardson Grove to keep out STAA trucks to prevent Big Box Stores such as Home Depot, is no longer applicable. Besides the Big Box Stores can afford to do reloads.

Caltrans announced recently that restrictions on larger, industry-standard sized trucks have been lifted on U.S. Route 101 in Del Norte and northern Humboldt counties.

These trucks, referred to as STAA trucks, were previously prohibited on U.S. Route 101 south of Anchor Way in Crescent City due to a tight curve near Big Lagoon. A recent project widened this curve and STAA trucks are now allowed on Route 101 as far south as Benbow in southern Humboldt County.

One STAA pinch point remains in District 1 (Del Norte, Humboldt, Mendocino, and Lake counties) at Richardson Grove in southern Humboldt County. A draft environmental document is currently being prepared for the Richardson Grove Improvement Project, a project to slightly modify the current alignment to allow STAA truck access. The draft environmental document is anticipated to be complete in October 2008. Once this pinch point is eliminated, all of Route 101 in District 1 will be open to STAA trucks.

Expect more of these letters as the price of fuel goes up. Fuel prices will go up, and will also tie in to the for FOR SMART. Don’t forget it will also allow a 70 mile walking, biking path.

With the price of gas expected to reach $6.50 a gallon by year’s end, it’s time those civic leaders opposed to multi-modal rail and SMART step up and really level with the public about their reasons for opposing rail. Unless those explanations get better than “those pesky horns” on grade crossings or obtuse environmental claims that lack grounding in truth or reality, our civic leaders better put the lawsuits and possibly their careers aside, get on the bandwagon and do everything in their power to get multi-modal rail on the track in the Marin-Sonoma corridor. That means it’s time for the budget-strapped city of Novato to end its childish, costly suit against the North Coast Railroad Authority.

Time for the Marin County Board of Supervisors to retract its amicus brief and support SMART by declaring the proposed funding with “most-favored priority status.”

It’s time Larkspur’s city council provides germane arguments opposing SMART or get on board with a co-located ferry-rail transit hub.

The objections are petty compared with the value and advantages that multi-modal rail immediately provides, plus the opportunities future enhancements SMART will encourage, such as inter-city tram and trolley services.

Transportation experts agree that current energy and economic conditions will affect permanent social changes regarding public transit. Across America, transit ridership is up 40 percent and residents of Denver call riding their new light-rail system “The New Patriotism.”

Marin County leadership needs to help get us back to the future, and rail puts all of us on the right track.

Steven Pointer

Loophole in deal with Schwarzenegger delays sharing gaming profits

By NANCY VOGEL
LOS ANGELES TIMES

Published: Sunday, June 22, 2008 at 4:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, June 22, 2008 at 6:37 a.m.

SACRAMENTO — Exploiting a loophole in a deal struck with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a San Diego County American Indian tribe has avoided paying the cash-strapped state $30 million in gambling profits.

Voters in February allowed four tribes to expand their casino operations in exchange for a larger share of their revenues. Three of the tribes must make the payments their compacts demand by the end of next month, but the Schwarzenegger administration last week said the Sycuan band of the Kumeyaay Nation could wait until next year to start payments.

That permission came four days after the Sycuan gave $45,000 to the campaign for a November redistricting initiative promoted by Schwarzenegger.

Sycuan spokesman Adam Day called the timing of the donation “a total coincidence.”

A Schwarzenegger spokeswoman also denied any connection between the $45,000 and the agreement.

“It’s not a donation that the governor solicited,” said Julie Soderlund. “Regardless, the governor doesn’t make decisions about policy based on anything other than what he feels is best for the state of California.”

Excusing the Sycuan will cost the state $30 million, according to H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the California Department of Finance.

Some opponents of the Schwarzenegger deals are saying, “I told you so.”

Doug Elmets, who represents gambling tribes that fought the others’ expansion, faults the Sycuan for not living up to its compact and the governor for not holding them to it. The two parties cut a side deal, he said, beyond what voters approved.

“It doesn’t look good, because clearly the governor and the tribes made it appear as if this was going to be real money,” said Elmets. “And now it looks like it’s phony.”

The Sycuan invoked a clause in its compact with Schwarzenegger, struck in August 2006, saying the tribal council had to approve the accord by Dec. 15, 2006. Otherwise, the governor could void the agreement.

The tribal council did not meet its deadline. But the governor declined to scrap the deal, agreeing instead to the delay.

Schwarzenegger’s legal affairs secretary, Andrea Lynn Hoch, said the postponement of payments was justified because the compact is good for the state and the tribe.

Day said the tribe wanted to plan its casino expansion before enacting the terms of the new agreement.

The Sycuan, like other tribes, has made payments to state-administered funds set up to help tribes without casinos and to help local governments cope with increased traffic and other casino side effects.

Under their agreements with Schwarzenegger, some of the four tribes’ money will go to the state budget.

The Sycuan now have until January to ratify the compact. Once the pact takes effect, the tribe must make payments quarterly. The compact calls for $20 million a year from the tribe plus 15 percent of the revenue from any slot machines it adds.

Of the four accords that were at stake in February, only one besides Sycuan’s — that of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians — required tribal council approval. The Morongo tribe ratified its deal in November 2006, long before the Legislature, U.S. Department of Interior and voters statewide gave approval.

The tribes with new deals — the Sycuan, the Morongo, the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians and the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians — spent $83 million campaigning for their casino expansions.

Their main claim was that the deals would generate billions of dollars for state coffers over the next 20 years.

During the campaign, Schwarzenegger appeared in television ads touting the financial benefits of the accords for taxpayers.

Opponents contended that the agreements would unleash one of the biggest gambling expansions in U.S. history and leave it up to the tribes to calculate California’s share of slot machine revenue.

Palmer said he expects the state to get $527 million from the new deals through June 2009.

So he has close ties to the corn based ethanol industry, supports heavy subsidies for it, and supports tariffs on importing more energy efficient sugar cane based ethanol which maybe illegal. Don’t worry though, as a Democrat, he will waiver, and change his mind.

VS McCain. Who says he would of vetoed the farm ethanol bill.

Link

How do you like that Eric?

MInd you maintence vehicles for the railroads do this all the time. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this. One way to increase the MPG of local buses.

An old article, but interesting.

Older models have gotten better mpg

By JANE HADLEY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Expensive new hybrid diesel-electric buses that were portrayed by King County Metro as “green” heroes that would use up to 40 percent less fuel than existing buses have fallen far short of that promise.

In fact, at times, the New Flyer hybrid articulated buses have gotten worse mileage than the often-maligned 1989 dual-mode Breda buses they are replacing. Yet the hybrid buses cost $200,000 more each than a conventional articulated diesel bus.
Metro hybrid bus
Zoom Gilbert W. Arias / P-I
Metro’s articulated hybrid buses were getting 3.75 miles a gallon in September.

The disappointing results are a far cry from the rosy predictions made by officials.

In May of this year, when Metro held a public event to herald the arrival of the first of the new hybrid buses, County Executive Ron Sims said they would save 750,000 gallons of fuel a year over the Bredas.

Metro was the first agency in the country to buy a 60-foot articulated bus with a hybrid diesel-electric technology. It ordered 235 of them, 213 for itself for $152 million and 22 for Sound Transit. Metro now has the largest fleet of hybrid buses in the world.

Hybrid diesel-electric buses use a battery-powered electric engine to assist a diesel engine. The batteries, carried on top of the bus, are charged both by the diesel engine and by capturing energy from braking action. The electric engine is especially valuable during acceleration from 0 to 12 mph, when a diesel engine would otherwise be gulping fuel, said Michael Voris Metro’s procurement supervisor.

Of Metro’s active fleet of nearly 1,400 buses, 1,005 are conventional diesel buses, 210 are hybrid diesel-electric, 144 are trolley buses and 28 are Bredas.

Despite the significantly higher cost and the underwhelming fuel efficiency of its hybrid buses, Metro had little choice but to get them, said Jim Boon, Metro’s vehicle maintenance manager. That’s because they are the only feasible bus Metro can use when it begins sharing the downtown bus tunnel with Sound Transit’s light rail line in 2009.

Besides, the hybrids have their good points, Boon said. The hybrid fleet as a whole is saving $3 million a year in maintenance costs over the Bredas. And they’re quieter than regular diesel buses and faster than the Bredas on hills and the highway.

They also have very low emissions — as do all the new buses Metro is buying these days, hybrid or not.

But the expected fuel efficiency has not been there. One apparent culprit is stricter federal emissions standards. Another could be that the hybrids are used on routes — suburban express routes with more highway mileage — where their advantages don’t shine.

In July, Yaz Yambe, a Metro schedule planner, asked Dennis Pingeon, Metro’s vehicle maintenance supervisor, whether the new hybrids could be assigned to 400-mile routes. Pingeon said he initially assumed it would be no problem, but when he checked, he found otherwise.

“Yaz, it does not appear we have very good news for you on hybrid miles per gallons,” Pingeon e-mailed Yambe.

The hybrids were not getting much better than 3.6 miles per gallon, yet they needed to average better than 4 mpg to be put on 400-mile routes. Pingeon suggested the hybrids not be put on any routes of over 300 miles for September.

“This is an unanticipated development,” Pingeon wrote. “We had expected the mileage figures to be much better — these figures are below our current Breda and conventional diesel New Flyer.”

Boon said that today, the hybrids sometimes get better mileage than the conventional diesels and the Bredas. But it’s difficult to compare different models, he said.

“It’s comparing apples and oranges and pears.”

And mileage performance varies from bus to bus, from route to route, and season to season, he said.

When he checked recently, Boon was told that Bredas are running at about 3.8 miles per gallon, while the conventional diesel older New Flyer articulated buses are running about four miles per gallon. The hybrids were getting 3.75 miles per gallon in September, but that has improved as the engines are getting broken in, Boon said. He expects further improvements with software tweaks.

“I’ve got hybrids that are getting four,” he said recently. And Boon said he was surprised when he was told that Bredas were getting 3.8, because they’ve more typically been below 3.5.

Overall, the hybrids are getting about equivalent mileage to the older buses, Boon agreed.

That’s not what was expected of the bus. In an October 2002 e-mail, Boon said, “The vendor indicates that hybrid buses can achieve up to 60 percent in fuel savings, but I am only projecting 20 percent to 30 percent given our hills and traffic congestion.”

A year later, as Metro ordered the buses, the agency said they could reduce fuel consumption by 20 percent to 40 percent.

TriMet, Portland’s regional transit agency, has only two hybrid buses, both the more common 40-foot hybrids.

Spokeswoman Mary Fetsch said the agency has been testing them since 2002.

“We like them,” she said. “The question is about the price and when they get into full production, will the price come down.”

“What we see with the fuel economy is there is improvement, but it may not be as much as we like,” Fetsch said. But the bus has exceeded expectations for emissions reductions.

TIAX, a Cambridge, Mass., consultant, said a year ago that many transit agencies appeared to be delaying purchases of hybrid buses to see whether they would become “less expensive and more reliable.”

Metro may have been a victim of bad timing.

The agency began road testing its first hybrid bus — Coach 2599 — in October 2002. The bus was put through grueling paces. It was run 20 hours a day, seven days a week loaded with barrels of water weighing 130 percent of normal capacity, to try to accumulate a year’s worth of wear and tear in a short time.

Metro technicians examined its transmission, its repair record, its use of oil and its fuel efficiency, among other things.

The early tests were very encouraging. In December, Boon reported to his bosses that the buses were at 15,000 miles and had experienced hardly any mechanical problems. The hybrid was achieving about 32 percent better fuel economy than the Breda — 4.46 miles per gallon compared with the Breda’s 3.37 miles per gallon, he reported.

In January 2003, Todd Gibbs, manager of the hybrids project, said on a posting on Metro’s Web site that the hybrid bus was achieving 40 percent better fuel economy than the Breda, even though it was overloaded with the water barrels. “We expect the numbers to go even higher,” he said.

As the tests continued, Metro staff members called the results “impressive” and “remarkable.”

But in July 2003, almost at the end of its testing period for the hybrid buses, Metro suddenly announced that it needed to switch engines.

The federal government had imposed stricter exhaust emissions standards, and the Cummins engine was not federally certified. Metro sent the bus to the Winnipeg, Manitoba, manufacturer to have a certified Caterpillar engine installed in its place.

The fuel economy results were never the same after the switch to the Caterpillar engine. Boon said it wasn’t just a switch in the engine but also a switch in the emissions control system.

Caterpillar spokesman Jim Dugan said it isn’t fair to compare today’s buses with 1989 buses like the Bredas, which were much dirtier.

“Emissions coming out of our engines today are dramatically better than for a bus of 1989,” he said. “The tradeoff is your fuel economy is not as good.”

Dugan said Caterpillar “optimized” the Metro hybrid engines for lower emissions rather than for better fuel economy.

“As the EPA tightens emission control requirements on truck and bus engines, fuel economy suffers,” Boon said. “The trucking industry is just going crazy over this right now.”

A week before the media event to announce the arrival of the hybrids in May of this year, Metro’s spokeswoman, Linda Thielke, exchanged e-mail with Voris. She wanted to break the supposed 750,000-gallon savings down into a per-bus savings.

Voris replied: “We have no revenue service experience with a Caterpillar-powered hybrid (articulated bus), so I am reluctant to make fuel economy claims.”

But a week later, a Metro statement said the hybrid fleet overall would save 750,000 gallons of fuel annually.

Despite that public claim of fuel savings, Boon said that when Metro prepared its budget for 2004, it projected no fuel savings.

The hybrid has allowed Metro to eliminate 14 technicians from its staff, but Boon agreed that comparing the hybrid bus’ maintenance savings to the Bredas is setting the bar rather low.

The Italian-made Bredas are notorious for the expense of their repair. Metro initially ordered spare parts from the manufacturer until Metro technicians could become more familiar with the buses and learn how to substitute lower-cost American parts. That resulted in $258 oil filters that could be bought locally for $4 and radiators costing Metro $6,292 that could be bought in Seattle for $742.

In more recent years, Metro has complained that the Bredas are difficult to repair because their original European-made parts have become more difficult to locate and often entail a long wait. At other times, a local manufacturer custom-makes parts for the buses.

“They’re a very unreliable bus,” Boon said, “It’s a bad marriage of many technologies.”

The dual-mode Bredas carried both diesel and electric trolley-powered engines and were bought in 1989 to deal with Seattle’s 1.3 mile-long downtown tunnel. Their rarity made them expensive.

The hybrids share some of that problem. Only one company, New Flyer, bid on the buses. But the only other alternative was even more unappealing, Boon said.

Boston recently bought a dual-mode trolley-diesel made in Germany for its tunnel. It cost $1.6 million per bus, compared with $645,000 per bus for Metro’s hybrid, Boon said.

“We didn’t buy this (hybrid) bus because of fuel economy,” Boon said. It has other desirable attributes, such as being cleaner, quieter, and saving on oil consumption and operating costs, but the tunnel forced the choice of the hybrids.

Regular diesels can’t be used in the tunnel because they are too noisy, Boon saids, and older diesels put out too many toxic, smelly fumes. A trolley would be difficult if not impossible in the tunnel now, because Sound Transit needs to use overhead power for light rail.

Ironically, when the new hybrids are booted out of the tunnel next September to make way for light rail construction, their fuel economy may well improve. They can then be put on the kinds of routes — city routes with lots of stop-and-go — where they might well show a fuel consumption advantage over other buses.

The buses will be removed from the tunnel for about two years for tunnel alterations. When the tunnel is reopened, the hybrids will share it with light rail until the time when the trains are running so frequently they will replace buses in the tunnel.

At the end of October, a statement appeared on Metro’s Web site. The headline: “Hybrid performance exceeding expectations.”

Prominently mentioned were the reliability, the lower operating costs, the noise reduction. Missing from the statement? Emissions and fuel economy.
P-I reporter Jane Hadley can be reached at 206-448-8362 or janehadley@seattlepi.com

Seamless train-ferry link
Walter Strakosch (Readers’ Forum, June 19) rightly argues that the more convenient a transit connection is, the more acceptable it will be to commuters.

To push his idea further, why not have the SMART cars load directly to ferries, which would carry them to San Francisco and offload to rail connections in the city?

In the early 20th century, rail cars for both freight and passengers were ferried from San Francisco to Marin.

The same idea could be applied to Michael Rex’s and Allan Nichol’s proposal to revive trolley lines in Marin (IJ, April 10).

Stuart H. Brown, San Rafael

Prop. 13 and SMART
Denver, Colo. has recently completed a brand new rail transit system of $57 million and 57 stations.

Voters have approved another 122 miles of track. They are making a mark on reducing petroleum consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Marin?

Marin has not.

Obviously, the voters in Denver are more ecological and smarter than those in Marin.

Oh, wait a minute.

Denver residents are not handcuffed by Proposition 13. Proposition 13 has deprived Californians of their right to tax themselves and has destroyed California’s infrastructure.

Repeal Jarvis-Gann and restore “one man; one vote.” Repeal the right of a small minority to preempt majority rule.

Jerome J. Ghigliotti, Novato LARKSPUR

Seems a shortage of rail cars made them unable to borrow one to show off at the Sonoma-Marin county fair.

An effort to bring a SMART-like train to show off at the Marin County Fair was one of SMART’s public relations goals.

But the agency couldn’t get its hands on one to show Marin voters what they could be riding.

SMART spokesman Chris Coursey said it hoped to borrow a train from The Sprinter, a new San Diego County service that runs between Escondido and Oceanside, but it didn’t have a train to loan SMART.

After its sales tax measure lost in 2006, SMART officials decided that they needed to do a better job of showing local voters what the train would look like. They wanted to bring the train to the county fair.

It was going to cost an estimated $30,000 to $50,000 to pull off, but it never got that far because they couldn’t get their hands on a train.

Instead, SMART will bring a small model of the train to the fair.