Closing time and how to find the blog

High-speed rail story: My colleague Eric Bailey will have a story online later and in Thursday's paper over the flap involving the proposed bullet train for California and the Union Pacific Railroad, which is saying it doesn't want to share its right of way with the speedy rail line.

Electric RAV for sale: We posted Tuesday about an electric Toyota RAV4 for sale on EBay for $53,000. The listing for the vehicle was yanked off the site today and the group Plug in America says someone was trying to sell the car under the name of an unknowing EBay user.

Finding this blog: We're still working to add some bells and whistles to this blog. In the meantime, you can find it on The Times' website not just under Blogs but by going to the California/Local page and clicking on the "traffic" button at the top of the page. If you want to bookmark the blog, the link is http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/bottleneck/.

-- Steve Hymon

Comments

[Dan Wentzel]

I'm so glad the Bottleneck Blog is back and is full throttle.

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The freight rail vs. passenger rail is a complex problem, as they use the same tracks often. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach provide tremendous amounts of economic activity. The current need to share the same tracks with Metrolink is part of what makes additional needed commuter rail problematic. Building separate tracks costs a lot of money. I don’t have an easy answer here. But I don’t think freight rail is the “enemy” here. We need to move both goods and people.

It’s a complex problem which probably requires a complex solution.

That recent economic “stimulus” package mostly went to pay down debt and stimulate the Chinese economy by low cost purchases would have been more effective stimulus had that money been spent on transportation and other infrastructure, on the kinds of jobs and goods that cannot be outsourced and have long term economic development contributions.

[Dave Bullock]

I know this isn't your department, but as I've already emailed support with no response (of course) I thought I would comment here.

First of all, you're ok. Your RSS feed is great and has a nice description as well as a title as an RSS feed should.

The problem is that a few weeks ago LAT changes ALL their non-blog RSS feeds to only include the headline. This makes choosing to read an article via RSS nearly impossible. Thus I have unsubscribed to all non-blog LAT RSS feeds and now get my news elsewhere.

Hopefully the tech department will figure out what they're doing and get back to me.

[Hallett Newman]

A high speed raid line between LA and Vegas I could agree with, depending on where the stops would be. Understand I don't live in California anymore {thankfully}, but it would be better to ride the train and leave your car at home. No, not for any green reason, but because you can't get around in that town anymore in a car. I understand UP's lack of interest in the project because they'd have to take better care of that track line. I'm sure it would also interfer with their making money at moving goods. It would also allow UP to travel faster too though.

I think the biggeswt problem, after getting UP to go with it, will be to getting the people of southern California to use it on a REGULAR basis. Since the dismantleing of the Red Cars people have been forced in to their private cars. Except for local metro buses rapid transit dosen't cut it. Even the light rail lines don't extend out to where the people liven or go where the people work.

Workers in LA live in the high desert, Inland Empire, OC, north LA county. Why drive 75 to 90 % of the way to work to find a parking space and ride the light rail system?