Municipal Property Management In Southeastern: Fill & Download for Free

Because they are dinosaurs. (Not just Greyhound, but all of them.) They hit a series of extinction-level events some thirty to fifty years ago, and the few (including Greyhound) that weren’t killed off were left for dead.And today, the motorcoach industry is so overripe for disruption as a result, that it can't even be considered a 'mature industry' when you think about it.They’re like daily newspapers and hotel franchising companies: they’re what I’d call ‘post-mature’ industries. Everything about them, and their operating model, is so past its prime, so no-longer-workable, and has accumulated layer upon layer of brokenness along the way, that, if — in this case — you wanted to own a nationwide motorcoach carrier, you’d be better off starting one from scratch and getting it right this time around than you would be if you could buy out Greyhound.One way or another, you’d be starting over from scratch, anyway. With a new carrier, you’d be limited to your investment costs. With Greyhound, you’d have to buy it at the current owners’ valuation, then completely gut it — wiping out the value of it in the process — and rebuild it from scratch, effectively paying for it twice (at least), but with a lot of uncertainty as to what value you’d be able to place on the end result.We looked at a hypothetical buyout of Choice Hotels three years ago, and arrived at the same conclusion. No matter how you ran the numbers, first you’d have to buy enough of the stock to get control of the company and its system. Then in order to fix its problems, you’d have to kick more than half of its franchised hotels out of the system — but what would the company then be worth, once you do? And afterward, can you get that many new hotels built, and franchisees signed, to replace them? And meanwhile, over the several years that it would take to do that, where are Choice’s now-existing customers going to go? And will you be able to get them to come back afterward? You’d be better off to just start a new hotel chain, from scratch.It’s like the municipal sanitary sewer system in Tegucigalpa, Honduras after Hurricane Mitch: engineers who went over it as part of an aid program after the hurricane concluded that it was in such bad shape to begin with, even before the storm, that the only way to proceed would be to just junk the entire system and start over.What happened to Greyhound and these other dinosaurs, you ask?The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and associated legislation.I hate to say it, because I don't like assuming the presence of racism in events or occurrences where it is possible that an undesirable event or occurrence may be due to some other cause (some people do do that, and it annoys me), but that seems to be one of three watershed events that would account for it.Whether or not in response, specifically, the simple fact at the time was that the industry had a lot of Southern good-old-boys running it, and it was also at this time that bus travel went from being regarded as a respectable, economical personal travel alternative, to a means of 'hauling' the underclass -- both black and white.The management of many of the carriers anticipated white flight. You won’t be able to get nice folks to choose to take the bus anymore, someone apparently figured, so don’t even try. You had the kind of people running the carriers who assumed that decent white people wouldn’t want to ride on a bus on which the seating wasn’t segregated, and who didn’t know how to distinguish between good black folks and ‘undesirable’ blacks.So, they resigned themselves to the idea that their function in the future would be transportation for the underclass, of whatever race. Instead of promoting family travel and an economical way to get there for college students, single ladies, and retirees, and keeping up their rolling stock and facilities at a level conducive to that kind of customer base as they had always done before; they just planned on taking whoever they could get as passengers, and ‘hauling’ them . . .Even in more recent years, people who take the bus are regarded as losers in life, and no one takes the bus if they have any other way to get there.And when management views its own customer base that way, when you see your own customers as a bunch of animals who deserve no better, bad things happen.They let their terminals run down accordingly. Even when they build a brand new one (often with some public investment, in many places nowadays), they let it start running completely to crap as soon as it opens.The Richmond, Va., terminal, when it was built around 1998, was absolutely impressive. It was clean, there was a nice restaurant with a good selection, and the food was good and was fairly priced. Its one drawback was that it’s comparatively isolated: it’s not within walking distance of anything except the ballpark across the Boulevard from it — as far as location goes, someone was out to get it out of downtown, that’s what they achieved, and they let it go at that.(Indeed, most of the people who travel through there are transferring passengers. If you take a Greyhound to the Northeast from anywhere in the southeastern quadrant of the United States — and maybe some points west of Texas — you’re going to change buses in Richmond; and board one that will take you straight to Washington, D. C., if that’s where you’re going. Or straight to Baltimore. Or straight to Philadelphia. Or straight to New York, with a rest stop in Baltimore, or straight to Boston, etc. . . . And traveling from any of those Northeastern cities, you go straight to Richmond, and your connection there, to get to anywhere in the Southeast.)Still, Greyhound could come back with terminals like this — if they’d only keep them up.But within two years, the Richmond terminal was filthy, it was as nasty as any bus terminal anywhere, the food was ‘captive audience’ quality at ‘captive audience’ pricing, with not nearly as much to pick from. The one time in my life I got into trouble and tossed into jail for a couple of days, it was cleaner, nicer and while the portions were small, the food wasn’t any worse. And you had undesirables hanging out — winos, panhandlers, homeless people — despite the Richmond terminal’s isolated location within the city: just the kind of people that people avoid taking the bus to avoid being around; but these are people who are taken for granted, even by Greyhound, as the sort of people who hang around bus terminals. Where do they bring these people in from? I know most of them can’t afford a Greyhound ticket. They couldn’t have walked there from anywhere that was within walking distance (the ballpark is across the Boulevard, there’s a convenience store a quarter mile away, and the rest is industrial sites — it’s relatively isolated for an urban bus terminal), you’d have to have something waiting there for you in order to have it be worth the hike. Does the city round them up and dump them there? Walk out the front doors, and there is a line of taxis whose drivers solicit aggressively. Well . . . if you don’t have a ride coming, you have to get away from that voodoo hellhole somehow.What’s even more pathetic than public investment in privately-owned bus terminals (often done with good intention, to encourage public transportation; but sometimes to get them moved to a place where they’d be less of a nuisance, as was probably the case in Richmond)? How about when the city wants to run you out of town, as the city of Riverside, California decided to do with Greyhound? It actually happened: they considered bus riders a potential nuisance. (Frankly, it’s the same as with cheap motels: you don’t have problems on the coaches themselves as frequently as you might wonder; high-profile incidents involving crazies who should be more easily spotted at the terminal notwithstanding. It’s usually the local people who are permitted to hang out at the terminal.) But let’s face it — when the host of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno refers to your bus company as “a bad neighborhood on wheels”, your reputation as a carrier is probably less than stellar.They let their coaches deteriorate — for as long as they owned them. Nowadays, they no longer own them, they lease them, because that’s how ‘disposable’ they’ve become. But when they did own them, they had no shame around how junky they’d let them get and still run them. When I was a teenager back in the seventies, a driver admitted to me that “they keep them and run them until they’ve worn them out ten times” . . . And this was during the good days of Carolina Trailways, and Seashore . . .The industry became ripe for divestment. The goal became, and has been ever since, don’t have any more money invested in this than you have to, and have it continue to run. It’ll run forever and give you a halfway decent income if you keep your costs down, but you don’t want any capital tied up in it.Everywhere they ever had any capital tied up in it, they’ve worked at getting that money out.Two events would occur in the late '70's and early '80's to make large scale divestment, without completely liquidating the company and giving up the income from it altogether, doable. Both were well-intended and an opportunity, but they just did not work well together in the hands of stockholders and management looking for ways to get their capital out and reduce their investment in it.Deregulation.Regulation was getting to be a bit much by the late seventies: if you owned a coach line, the Interstate Commerce Commission had to approve your routes, stops, schedules and fares at the Federal level. Abuse certainly occurred. ICC operating authority, once obtained, was viewed as property: authority to operate on a certain route could be sold between private parties or companies. Some people even acquired operating authority on certain routes, even though they owned no coaches (of course, claiming they’d get some, although they had no intention of actually doing so), and leased it to a bus company (well . . . that’s how they went about getting the coaches). And because you are a common carrier if you own scheduled bus lines, and your license to operate was given to you as a result by a governmental finding — that you asked for — that the service you had in mind to offer is essential to the ‘public convenience and necessity’, it was hard to talk the ICC into letting you discontinue an unprofitable run.For Greyhound and the other established carriers, this kept stability in place — their routes were protected from competition, and the fares that they were permitted to charge assured that most of them would be very profitable — but it also locked in some very bad market responsiveness. They saw a lot of opportunity to be had for themselves if the regulations went away, and they could be free to eat a few competitors’ lunch, oblivious to the idea that new competitors might spring out of the woodwork and want to do the same to them. (Or even swoop down from the sky and do it, as the newly-deregulated, low-cost start-up airlines would do to the bus carriers.) And of course, they could cut some runs: if you weren't going to have but eight people on board for most of the trip, why tie up a 50-passenger coach that, purchased new, cost today’s equivalent of $500,000?They got their wish. Unfortunately, right at the same time, so did the airlines. Routes, stops, schedules and fares would thenceforth be regulated, if at all, at the state level. Once airlines started expanding, and especially as new low-cost carriers all but started popping up out of the ground, you could fly for not much more money than you could take a bus.This caused some disruption and uncertainty, while it lasted. For years, Greyhound had it too good for too long, and didn't mind sharing: the union-represented drivers were paid very well, and you had a professional class of drivers. Now, the unprofitable runs were gone, but so were the high profit margins on the more profitable runs.In late 1983, Greyhound -- in response to the lower margins it had to accept with the new competition from the airlines -- asked the drivers to take a small cut. (From $27 per hour to $25. In 1983 dollars. I know lots of people who wish they could make $25 per hour today.) The union wouldn't go along. They went on strike when the contract ran out, and the strike didn't succeed: Greyhound started cutting runs, and hiring non-union drivers, and ultimately broke the union.The emergence of new financing models.Equipment leasing: Back in the day, carriers had to buy and own their coaches. Equipment leasing, as an ownership model, began to occur in the late seventies.If you owned a bus line and wanted to put a few new coaches on the road, then for not much more than it would take to make the payments if you financed them, you could have the coaches painted in your livery, and you would not have to worry about selling them off when the lease term ran out. When you wore them out or the maintenance and repair costs on them started getting too high, you could just turn them back in and get new ones. Henceforth, Greyhound wouldn't own its coaches: insurance companies and doctors and lawyers with loose money in search of a passive investment would own them, and Greyhound would just pay the rent and operate them on its lines.If you own a bus line, the deal has its advantages. You didn't have to run ten-year-old coaches on your more marginal runs. Since newer coaches are more reliable, not nearly as badly worn, and aren’t so frequently in need of repair, you could eliminate a lot of jobs for mechanics who you’d otherwise need to coax another two years out of a fifteen-year-old diesel engine. And if you wanted to expand and your company had a good track record, the upfront cost of acquiring new coaches was much lower.But there's a flipside: you have to pay the lease on the coaches. You have to make the payments every month, no matter how few or how many people ride the bus. This made the breakeven point for many runs much, much higher, and further disincentivized continuing the runs that were more marginal.Leveraged buyouts: This caused Carolina Trailways and Seashore Trailways, the two Trailways carriers that dominated where I grew up, and for which I used to work back in the day, to die a miserable, painful death that was sickening to watch (When you hit the link, scroll down to read the history: the guy who built this website — a blog that was written in HTML back in the days before WordPress — and researched and wrote all the material on it doesn’t organize it very well).I worked for them at a time when their corporate owners, North American Philips, seemed to be committed to some serious reinvestment. Carolina built a nice new terminal in Raleigh to replace the ugly, old, badly designed art-deco barn next to Raleigh’s City Hall: the city wanted to knock the old terminal down and expand the City Hall. Seashore replaced their old terminal in Jacksonville, N. C. — located on a rowdy stretch of what was at the time the city’s infamous Court Street — with a nice facility that had been acquired by the local electric co-op and adapted for use as a bus terminal, complete with overpriced restaurant. They invested in some new MCI coaches, and Seashore acquired its Trailways affiliation.But in the end, it turned out that North American Philips was just shining it up in hopes of finding a buyer.It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d found a buyer that wanted to run a bus company, but the people that ended up with the two companies promptly recovered their investment and then some by stripping and selling off everything of value, then holding the combined company (they merged the two of them) together with shoestring and baling wire until they were able to get Greyhound to buy it from them.Greyhound itself was acquired by a former Continental Trailways executive, in a deal so badly overleveraged that, even if he had been able to fill every seat on every coach, every run, he still would have not been able to pay the debt on it. He had made the deal to buy it hoping to quickly take it public in an IPO. What he hadn’t considered adequately in advance of making his move is, hey, Greyhound is leasing its coaches instead of buying them nowadays, so all of its assets are gone except for some terminals in questionable downtown locations that are hard to put a value on and may take you some time to sell at a decent price. No one is going to touch this stock with a ten-foot pole at a price that will bring you enough money to get you out of the hole you’ve dug yourself into.Needless to say, this gentleman had to eventually get his debt restructured — and did such a good job of refinancing that he was able to acquire his former company Continental Trailways in a leveraged buyout, as well, and merge the two. The combined company was itself overleveraged (albeit by only 200% instead of 300% as Greyhound was prior to the Continental acquisition), had problems with the drivers unions, and ended up in bankruptcy a few years later.This killed Trailways as a brand, or at least left it to a fate worse than death. Continental Trailways — officially, “Trailways, Inc.” — was the single largest member of the Trailways consortium, larger than all the other Trailways members combined. When Continental was merged into Greyhound, nothing was left of Trailways as a carrier except for some regional member carriers scattered around the country. These surviving member carriers changed the bylaws of the National Trailways Bus System to insure that never again would a Trailways carrier become that dominant, and that ‘too big to fail’ and be able to do that much damage if they went out of business, left the Trailways system, or were acquired — but in doing so, they made entry into the Trailways system so onerous for new carriers that it isn’t worth doing. They effectively insured that Trailways as a brand would survive only in fragmented, disconnected pieces, and can never again be the nationwide carrier that it once was.Trailways is now pretty much a network of charter carriers: less than a dozen of its current 50–60 member carriers have scheduled runs anymore (New York Trailways/Adirondack Trailways in New York state, and Burlington Trailways in the upper Midwest, are the biggest ones: Susquehanna Trailways, which operates along the I-80 corridor between State College, Pa. and Port Authority, is the only other one of any size.). Nearly all the rest that have scheduled service at all are local feeder lines for Greyhound.After a few more corporate owners (one of which took it into bankruptcy again), Greyhound is now owned by a British company that seems intent on restoring some respectability to it: they’ve upgraded the coaches as they replace them, and now have leather seats and free wi-fi. And they’re innovating a bit: they are now partnered with Peter Pan on BoltBus, which keeps overhead low by offering only reserved, curbside service, and a yield-managed pricing model (book it online at just the right time, and you can get your ticket for a dollar).Deregulation, low margins, and debt incurred through leveraged buyouts, has kept Greyhound cash-strapped through most of the last 30–40 years, and there has been very little reinvestment in that time. Upgrading the coaches is easy, if you’re leasing the coaches: all you have to do is rewrite the specs, and they calculate that into the lease payments. The terminals and stations are still . . . bus terminals. Port Authority in New York City, for example, was back in the day considered a typical, nasty, big city terminal that no one liked. Now, it’s about average — even though its condition hasn’t improved that much over the years, and even though it still has some problems. If anything, it has more to offer than most.Greyhound’s problem nowadays is that it doesn’t seem to want to have any money invested in anything. They continue selling off existing, dedicated bus terminals that they own, and placing their company owned (or leased) facilities in smaller locations (e.g., Raleigh), and using overburdened agency stops that draw complaints (e.g., Virginia Beach).Availability of their coaches is spread thin: the last time I took a Greyhound, it broke down in Durham (N. C.), the Durham ticket agent put us all in taxis to the Greyhound terminal in Raleigh to make our connection — which turned out to be another broken-down bus. They had to send another bus up from Fayetteville to replace that one and take us to New Bern after a six-hour wait — where the driver managed to get lost and not be able to find the station there. Not the kind of thing that has me in any hurry to take another Greyhound trip.The union is gone, the pay isn’t nearly that good anymore, and Greyhound will hire anyone who has — or can get — a CDL to drive a coach. That means anyone. On a trip to North Carolina from New York City some years ago, we pulled into Richmond and the bus made an unexpected stop prior to pulling into the terminal and unloading us . . . several blocks from the terminal. The driver got off and went into the store. I was wondering if there was some sort of problem, and thinking it had to be pretty bad if we couldn’t make it the remaining mile and a half to the terminal to deal with it. But there was no problem. The driver re-emerged from the store a few minutes later with a couple cartons of cigarettes. He made a personal stop, on our time, to buy some low-tax Virginia smokes to take back to New York with him.And that’s before we even go there about the one a few years back, out West, who had some sort of mental breakdown, and refused to travel further, quitting her job in some hick town in Utah and leaving a busload of passengers stranded. Twice. On the same run. The first time she did it, the local cops intervened and made her get back on the bus and continue the trip. In the next town, she abandoned the bus and its passengers, and vanished completely.Or the one earlier this year who pulled off into a rest area on I-80 in Pennsylvania, and checked into a motel next door to take a nap, leaving the coach -- full of passengers who had no idea what was going on -- just sit there. Availability of drivers is spread pretty thin, too, and safety issues have been raised over drivers exceeding their allowed hours, working irregular shifts, and not getting enough rest.Ninety percent of automobile drivers rate their driving skills as ‘above average’. And you’re asking people to take the bus instead, while you hire drivers who do things like THAT?But when your customer base is made up of losers in life who have no choices, and deserve no better . . .FirstGroup may be sincere in its desire to turn it around someday, but lots of days can come and go between now and then and in the meanwhile, Greyhound is run by people who don’t give a shit. They’ve long ago reduced the entire company -- the entire industry — to something its users have to use because they have no choice, there are enough of those people that their customer base is assured. Anyone else that might consider taking a bus isn’t going to put up with it, so they’re not making the investment in drawing any other customers. Want to fix it? You’ve got coaches and terminals across the country, and you’ve only got this much money to work with, and that’s all you’ll have each year, if even that much, for however long it takes — where do you start?Greyhound is a post-mature company. Seth Godin used to say the same thing, over and again, about American Airlines until they got bought out: the things about American Airlines that made American a post-mature company are probably the reason it couldn’t hope to continue on its own and had to end up in bankruptcy and be bought out. (And in looking through his material for just one of his blog posts on the subject that would serve as typical and succinct to explain just why Seth felt that way about AMR, two things happened: 1) I just gave up and linked the Google search instead, and 2) I came across this little gem for the first time, and no, despite the fact that Seth is one of my favorite bloggers and the marketing expert I respect most, I swear I don’t recall ever having seen it before I wrote what I’ve written here, that you’ve read thus far.)That’s probably why Greyhound launched BoltBus — of course, competition from Chinatown buses and curbside carriers might have been a factor, and they wanted to have their hat in the ring on that business model; but I’d bet that even Greyhound gets it that they may just have to junk Greyhound and start over.What’s going to happen next?I haven’t completed costing it out, but it’s truly amazing how little the initial investment it would take to completely disrupt Greyhound and the other major carriers.Here’s how I’d go about it:Start in a small geographical region, work outward: Our initial, Winston-Salem, N. C. base, would be capable of functioning as a self-contained regional carrier. Adding a second one in Greenville, N. C. (from which, by itself, we could cover all of the same routes as the now-defunct, Seashore Transportation Company did for several decades) would give us statewide coverage.Additional bases - each the base of a service area having a 200-mile radius - would give us a corresponding increase in coverage. Each additional base also allows a synergy in terms of allowing every station within the operating area of each base to sell tickets to any location within the operating area of any other.Not only does adding bases expand our service area (e.g., Bethlehem, Pa. and Macon, Ga., in the next map), but adding bases within our existing service area (e.g., Charlotte in the next map) allows us to offer more direct runs with fewer connections, simplify our operations at the nearby bases, and add to our driver base (hiring drivers in Charlotte and having them based there would allow us to make do with fewer drivers at the nearby Winston-Salem and Columbia bases).Once we have a base in Bethlehem, a station in Savannah, and stations in most major cities in between, we can offer express runs up and down the entire East Coast that only stop in major cities.From there, it's a simple matter of expanding westward with new bases, and new coaches. (It’s scalable. We will have to buy the first several coaches that we operate, but once we show that we can generate the cash flow consistently, expansion is a simple matter of hiring and training new drivers, establishing the bases and depot stops, and leasing more coaches.)There's no need to 'beat' Greyhound. As we expand, we'll simply render them irrelevant.Smaller coaches: These would give us the flexibility to serve communities that cannot be served profitably by a full-sized coach. Because these smaller coaches are not restroom equipped, we take care to schedule a rest stop every two hours or so en route. I’d bet, however, that communities who’ve been without scheduled Greyhound or Trailways service for ten to thirty years now, would be happy they’re getting a bus at all.The average number of people who are, at any given moment, on board a Greyhound bus is 27 — and that's when you calculate into the average runs in crowded Northeast areas where the bus stays pretty full. So, why tie up a half million in capital for a full-size coach, when you can put that many on board one of these for $72,000?For more heavily-traveled runs, you might want to have a 36-passenger coach available. With a lav — these coaches (the way I submitted the specs) are for longer, busier runs and would come restroom equipped. Still, the investment required to put two Greyhound full-sized coaches on the road would give us five of these to work with:Not quite what you’re used to seeing as prevailing industry standard now. (Or is it? Can you tell the difference by looking? Besides no leather?)But . . . if your typical passenger load is 27 passengers, I have it on pretty good authority that 36 seats isn’t, historically, an altogether bad size for a coach. Basic arithmetic has a little to do with it of course; but anyone my age or older might recall the sixties, when those ubiquitous General Motors 36-passenger coaches like you see below were the backbone of both Greyhound’s and Trailways’ fleets . . . (Both of these are GMC PD-4104’s, built between the early ‘50’s into the early ‘60’s. I think more of that model were produced than any other coach model ever made, before or since. Back then, that size was quite normal.)Be anal about stations and terminals, and the stuff that happens around them: If I appear to have thought about this for some time, and seem to have much of the business plan written up for it already . . . well, yes, I have. I came up with the idea for a bus company nearly twenty years ago; and was inspired to do just that, in the sort of place where some guys go for a different kind of inspiration altogether: a porn shop.That was literally where the Greyhound/Peter Pan station in New Britain, Connecticut was located: a cigar store with a section in the back, quite visible to waiting bus passengers, devoted to pornography; complete with the occasional porn pervert browsing through the material on display. My car was in the shop one week when I was living in Connecticut, and I had to catch a bus into Boston, so I was kind of stuck with it. I recall thinking, I don’t want to be around this shit — and while I'm going on a tear with it, let's look at a few other things I don't want to be around that you see all the time in even 'average' bus stations. Filth and dirt. Overpriced, low-quality food, if there's any food at all. Homeless people hanging out. Panhandlers. Creeps loitering in and around the restrooms. Uncomfortable seating. Location in bad areas of town. All the things that everyone hates about bus terminals, but that even motorcoach operators seem to think is quite normal, that 'goes with the turf', about bus terminals. And it seems to get worse and worse. And now, this . . .And I started making notes and outlining some ideas during the ride to Boston that very day.New Britain, Connecticut: How not to do it.We would only contract with reputable businesses for our agency stops, and insist as part of our agency agreement that they maintain their facilities in accordance with our standards. If you want your establishment to be one of them, it will be listed on TripAdvisor, and we do read your reviews. We’d regularly inspect our agency stops to insure that they are clean, comfortable, have reasonable accommodations for waiting passengers, and are managed in alignment with the way we operate our own stations and terminals.This goes for public facilities (the city-owned bus terminal in Winston-Salem, N. C., was in the news this past week because of a bedbug infestation), and shared Greyhound facilities, too. I’ve seen what Greyhound will let them get away with, and they can be the worst offenders.Not the sort of thing I want to see at my bus terminal.Good security is a non-negotiable. Passengers are absolutely entitled to a safe, comfortable wait, and you don’t see homeless people, panhandlers, or people who have no reason to be there loitering about. If I wouldn't want my fourteen-year-old niece waiting alone for a bus at your location, your location is not going to be a depot stop for my bus company.Good security is not negotiable — and this isn’t what I call good security. If your ticket window requires bulletproof glass, you’re probably selling tickets to people I don’t want as passengers. If that’s what it takes to achieve security in the part of town you’re in, you’re in the wrong part of town.I want it done right. I’m just weird that way. It’s clean, it’s comfortable, it doesn’t smell bad, you don’t mind being there, there is food and refreshments available, and it isn’t too badly overpriced . . .Bottom line: we would rather simply have a roadside or street stop, and provide only curbside service in a town, than to have a bad depot or station. At least, everyone knows to not expect too much from having to wait on the side of the road.Family-friendly: One thing you might pick up on in our advertising is how all of our advertising pics show families? Mommies and daddies taking a trip with the kids, like they do in Europe? Many of us just take it for granted that bus travel is for people who have no other way to get there, and that you're not likely to meet anyone worth knowing if you do have to take the bus for some reason.For this bus company, we'd be resurrecting our own twist on the old "You meet the nicest people on a Honda" blue ocean strategy from the sixties, that opened up a vastly larger market for motorcycles than previously existed among just the Harley riders and their hellraiser wannabes, when Honda motorcycles first made their appearance in the U. S.(Besides, we remember when bus travel wasn't just for the riff-raff . . . Maybe I’m getting old, but I come from a time when people remembered what it was like to actually like buses and bus travel. Lots of people still would, if you gave them half a chance. ‘Blogs’ didn’t make their appearance until about ten years ago, yet the web abounds with websites and bulletin boards and user groups made up of people who are into the history of buses.)And our buses, and terminals, must be pretty convenient, safe and comfortable, if families and nice old folks — people who have a choice and would find another way to get there if our fleet and facilities were run down and nasty — choose to use them.The old Southern good-ol’-boys who used to run the carriers in the sixties, and who were so traumatized by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, are all gone, retired or died off by now; but even today the mindset, even by more well-meaning, ‘liberal’ politicians, officials, and bus company executives, is that the bus is for people who don’t have cars.Let’s rethink that: The bus is for everyone. Even people who have a choice — especially people who have a choice. Now, what can we do to have them CHOOSE taking the bus?Instead of wandering the mall, how can we talk some of these retired folks into taking a day trip to the zoo? (Of course, putting the North Carolina Zoological Park on the schedule might help . . .)What kind of attractions are there in Boone that we can perhaps work with so that we can sell day trips there: get some people on a nearly empty outbound bus in the morning, who’d come home on an otherwise nearly empty inbound bus in the evening?I’d put one or two hotel sales people to work on this one.The airport is your friend, not your competitor: Making a point to offer scheduled service to large airports on our lines opens up an opportunity for a businessman in, say, Alamance County, to get to Raleigh-Durham International Airport for his flight.Service to airports opens up another opportunity. As we contemplated service to Newport News, Virginia and were stuck for an appropriate station location, it dawned on us: Newport News-Williamsburg International Airport is one of the few airports of its size, in any city the size of Newport News, that is located right in the middle of the city that it serves. And more to the point, the success and perhaps even survival of Newport News-Williamsburg International depends upon its ability to compete with Norfolk International Airport, which is not that far away. Why not just plan on putting the terminal there if they’ll let us?The airport is our friend, not our competitor. No one who can afford to fly to L. A. or Houston from the east coast is going to take the bus. And if you're not going that far away (say, between Newport News and Norfolk), the bus makes so much more sense.So, we consider not only large airports like Raleigh-Durham, Piedmont-Triad, Charlotte, Atlanta, and the Washington airports as we plan our routes; but also the smaller regional airports, such as Fayetteville Regional, Jacksonville (N. C.), and Richmond. For the opportunity to shag air passengers away from Charlotte, Greenville-Spartanburg should be willing to offer us much better terms and facilities than, say, the bus deck at Union Station in Washington, D. C. ($30,000 per year per 'slip', and I'll buy you dinner if you can prove to me that Greyhound pays that much).To solidify our market position in this area, we will be offering reduced rates from all airports to outlying, larger cities.Greyhound can fuss all they want about ‘competition’ from low-cost airlines. But Southwest Airlines doesn’t fly to North Wilkesboro, or Quakertown, or Waterbury . . .From us, you get the scenic tour: One thing about taking the bus that used to drive people nuts - even in the heyday of buses, at the height of their popularity - is that the bus stopped in every little hick town, which slowed down the trip and made getting where you wanted to go take longer.We can't avoid that: this company was developed and designed to serve smaller communities that Greyhound considers not worth having.So we're going to try and turn that into a selling point, create a new context for it, suggest an alternate way of looking at it. From us, you get the scenic tour. (Note the pics of small town Americana -- within the areas that we serve -- located here and there around our website.)I originally contemplated it as a Trailways carrier, but despite the access to the rich history and Trailways' place in 20th century Americana which we would love to have as part of our own, doing so doesn't appear to be workable.(Trailways now requires of new members — which they don’t recruit very diligently, and seem to not care too much if they never add another one —that your bus company has been in business for at least five years prior to applying for Trailways affiliation. By the time we’ve been in business for five years, we’re going to have so much invested in any brand we use in the meanwhile, that we’re not going to want to give that up, change all the livery and the signage and the website and the promotional material, paint all of the coaches red, and go Trailways. Nor do I like the requirement that if we expand scheduled service into a geographical area, we have to first obtain the consent of any Trailways carrier in that area — most of whom are charter carriers and should have no say in scheduled services. And if a carrier, even a Trailways carrier, who offers scheduled services wants to have his crappy operation protected from competition; well, that’s why Satan invented state utility commissions who regulate competition between motor carriers that operate within the state, and those carriers’ political connections on those commissions. I’m not signing up for something that requires me to suck up yet another layer of such regulation.)Still, anticipation of our market position as a would-be Trailways carrier while it lasted as part of the plan; with Trailways’ historic, Mom-and-apple-pie small town roots, opened up some added appreciation of this particular market position.Don’t be Greyhound-dependent: We'll work with Greyhound, and endeavor to maintain a positive relationship with them wherever possible. We're not going to get sucked into a stand-up fight with them where we can avoid it. It is to the much greater benefit of both us and Greyhound that we work together, and play and get along well together.Greyhound is famous for its ‘running dog’ mascot. We plan to use a black cat.But even if we don’t, the harm will be limited to slowing us down for a few years -- after which, we'll catch up to and surpass Greyhound with a vengeance.We contract our own stations, terminals and depots; and avoid sharing facilities with Greyhound unless: 1) the facilities meet our standards. and 2) we control the ticket counter - or at least don't stand to be hurt badly by Greyhound or a third-party agency engaging in favoritism toward Greyhound or another carrier against us in ticket sales from that location. (Most of our passengers - and ticket sales - to and from places where we’d use Greyhound as an agent, travel to and from smaller cities and towns not served by Greyhound. So if you approach a Greyhound ticket counter in one of those places, and want to purchase a ticket to a town served only by us, guess which carrier Greyhound is going to sell you a ticket on?)We’d have no "pooling" agreements with Greyhound, and do not intend to enter into any. Could we ask as part of such a deal that Greyhound not expand its service or not add any more runs to the area in competition with us? No - that would be illegal under federal antitrust law (unless the Surface Transportation Board okayed it): we'd just have to trust them, and rely upon a built-in disincentive in investing their money, equipment and resources into a line that would produce revenue that would have to be shared with us. With such an agreement in place, could we expand our service within the areas affected by the pooling agreement? Yes -- but why should we make the investment of funds, coaches, drivers and other resources, only to have Greyhound collect a percentage of the revenue even if they choose not to match the investment? Besides, the whole scheme smacks of the dystopian "Railroad Unification Plan" and the "Steel Unification Plan" in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Several companies that have gone into pooling agreements with Greyhound -- for example, Carolina Trailways, Seashore Transportation -- have since disappeared, and so have many of their runs.Eight mid-size coaches to start out, at about seventy-five grand a pop? . . . one convenience store (which would be a revenue source in itself), with a rear loading area, to use as a central base terminal? . . . It’s doable.There’s an opportunity in it. Right now, gas in the U. S. is cheap, by contrast to some recent years. And regardless of the price of gas in the U. S., we pay less for it than any other country on earth except Venezuela. Even Canadians pay three to four times as much. How long can that last? Eventually, U. S. gas prices are going to have to get in line with the others. We need to have some more public transportation options at the ready when that time comes.Much of the investment involved would be getting your ducks in a row in advance, just doing the work setting it up. The burn rate for the first year is more of a source of concern to me than the capital outlay . . .Your only competitors are people who don’t want to have any money invested in anything. They’ve already squeezed everything they can out of it, and can’t squeeze it any further without crushing it completely. They feel that doing so won’t expand their customer base significantly. But it’s been the late sixties since they’ve really tried. And since the customer base they’re left with has nowhere else to go — well, they’re not going to be easy to work with about personal needs, and individual attention, and refunds where appropriate.Greyhound and the other carriers have no idea just how vulnerable that they — and their entire business model — are.

Good question as there is no lack of water in the world. In fact there is a great excess of fresh water far more than we will ever need. The issue is how we manage water.Too much reliance on VOLUNTARY CUTS in demand for water fails like the tragedy of the commons economic parable. Everyone waits for someone else to suffer the cuts. Nestle and other corporations argue for water privatization that will bring the advantage of market pricing to control supply, but they ignore the reality that water is more like air than oil. At some level is water not a human right?David Zetland7/15/2008 @ 6:00AMThe Water Shortage Mythhttp://www.forbes.com/2008/07/14/california-supply-demand-oped-cx_dz_0715water.htmlCalifornia is perpetually portrayed as suffering from a shortage of water. Case in point: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently declared a statewide drought, telling citizens to prepare for rationing. But the state’s problems are not a result of too little water.



The real problem is that the price of water in California, as in most of America, has virtually nothing to do with supply and demand.California Drought Hurts More Than the Ag Industry[photo is my addition]Although water is distributed by public and private monopolies that could easily charge high prices, municipalities and regulators set prices that are as low as possible. Underpriced water sends the wrong signal to the people using it: It tells them not to worry about how much they use.



Low prices lead to shortages. Water managers respond to them with calls for conservation. But this often fails.Residents in San Diego County, for example, were asked in June 2007 to cut their water use by 20 gallons a day. They used more. When voluntary conservation fails, water agencies impose mandatory rationing, which is unfair and inefficient because people who have historically been water misers are cut back by the same percentage as water hogs.If water was priced to reflect scarcity, a decrease in supply would lead to an increase in price, and people would demand less.Consider another precious liquid: oil. Despite popular perception, there is no shortage of oil; supply does equal demand at the present price. It’s just that supply meets demand at a higher price than it did a few years ago.In a sensible water pricing system, everyone would be guaranteed a base quantity of water at a low price. Those who used more would face a steep price hike.



As it stands, Los Angeles households pay $2.80 for the first 885 gallons they use per day. That’s enough water to fill 18 bathtubs. The next 18 tubs cost $3.40, which is only 20% more. Most L.A. households don’t even see this price increase, since the average household of three uses just 350 gallons–about seven bathtubs–each day. For that water, the household pays only $35 a month. If they use twice the amount, the bill merely doubles.I propose a system where every person gets the first 75 gallons, or 1.5 bathtubs, per day for free but pays $5.60 for each 75 gallons after that. Under my system, the monthly bill for the average household of three would come to $95.



My system is designed to reduce demand rather than cover costs. Revenue paid by guzzlers would cover the costs of those who use only a small amount of water. Any leftover profits could be refunded to consumers or used to enhance the quality or quantity of the water supply.We can solve Aerica’s water “shortage” in the same way that we would solve a shortage in any market. Increase prices until the quantity demanded falls to equal supply. This pricing system would ensure that everyone gets a basic allocation of cheap water while forcing guzzlers to pay a high price.Want to use more water? Pay for it.David Zetland is a visiting fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. He writes about the economics of water on the blog aguanomics.com.Nestle Continues Stealing World’s Water During DroughtBy Dan BacherGlobal Research, March 26, 2015Theme: Environment, Law and JusticeImage: The Arrowhead Mountain Water Company bottling plant, owned by Swiss conglomerate Nestle, on the Morongo Indian Reservation near Cabazon, Calif. Photo credit: Damian Dovarganes/AP.The city of Sacramento is in the fourth year of a record drought – yet the Nestlé Corporation continues to bottle city water to sell back to the public at a big profit, local activists charge.The Nestlé Water Bottling Plant in Sacramento is the target of a major press conference on Tuesday, March 17, by a water coalition that claims the company is draining up to 80 million gallons of water a year from Sacramento aquifers during the drought.The coalition, the crunch nestle alliance, says that City Hall has made this use of the water supply possible through a “corporate welfare giveaway,” according to a press advisory.A coalition of environmentalists, Native Americans and other concerned people announced the press conference will take place at March 17 at 5 p.m. at new Sacramento City Hall, 915 I Street, Sacramento.The coalition will release details of a protest on Friday, March 20, at the South Sacramento Nestlé plant designed to “shut down” the facility. The coalition is calling on Nestlé to pay rates commensurate with their enormous profit, or voluntarily close down.“The coalition is protesting Nestlé’s virtually unlimited use of water – up to 80 million gallons a year drawn from local aquifers – while Sacramentans (like other Californians) who use a mere 7 to 10 percent of total water used in the State of California, have had severe restrictions and limitations forced upon them,”according to the coalition.“Nestlé pays only 65 cents for each 470 gallons it pumps out of the ground – the same rate as an average residential water user. But the company can turn the area’s water around, and sell it back to Sacramento at mammoth profits,”the coalition said.Activists say that Sacramento officials have refused attempts to obtain details of Nestlé’s water used. Coalition members have addressed the Sacramento City Council and requested that Nestle’ either pay a commercial rate under a two tier level, or pay a tax on their profit.Cracks in the dry bed of the Stevens Creek Reservoir in Cupertino, Calif. Photo credit: Marcio Jose Sanchez/APIn October, the coalition released a “White Paper” highlighting predatory water profiteering actions taken by Nestle’ Water Bottling Company in various cities, counties, states and countries. Most of those great “deals” yielded mega profits for Nestle’ at the expense of citizens and taxpayers. Additionally, the environmental impact on many of those areas yielded disastrous results.Coalition spokesperson Andy Conn said,“This corporate welfare giveaway is an outrage and warrants a major investigation. For more than five months we have requested data on Nestlé water use. City Hall has not complied with our request, or given any indication that it will. Sacramentans deserve to know how their money is being spent and what they’re getting for it. In this case, they’re getting ripped off.”For more information about the crunchnestle alliance, contact Andy Conn (530) 906-8077 camphgr55 (at) Gmail or Bob Saunders (916) 370-8251Nestlé is currently the leading supplier of the world’s bottled water, including such brands as Perrier and San Pellegrino, and has been criticized by activists for human rights violations throughout the world. For example, Food and Water Watch and other organizations blasted Nestlé’s “Human Rights Impact Assessment” in December 2013 as a “public relations stunt.”“The failure to examine Nestlé’s track record on the human right to water is not surprising given recent statements by its chair Peter Brabeck challenging the human right to water,” said Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch. She noted that the company famously declared at the 2000 World Water Forum in the Netherlands that water should be defined as a need—not as a human right.“In November 2013, Colombian trade unionist Oscar Lopez Trivino became the fifteenth Nestlé worker to be assassinated by a paramilitary organization while many of his fellow workers were in the midst of a hunger strike protesting the corporation’s refusal to hear their grievances,” according to the groups.The press conference and protest will take place just days after Jay Famiglietti, the senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech and a professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine, revealed in an op-ed in the LA Times on March 12 that California has only one year of water supply left in its reservoirs.“As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought. NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002, when satellite-based monitoring began, although groundwater depletion has been going on since the early 20th century.Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.”Meanwhile, Governor Jerry Brown continues to fast-track his Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) to build the peripheral tunnels to ship Sacramento River water to corporate agribusiness, Southern California water agencies, and oil companies conducting fracking operations. The $67 billion plan won’t create one single drop of new water, but it will take vast tracts of Delta farm land out of production under the guise of “habitat restoration” in order to irrigate drainage-impaired soil owned by corporate mega-growers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.The tunnel plan will also hasten the extinction of Sacramento River Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, Delta and longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other fish species, as well as imperil the salmon and steelhead populations on the Klamath and Trinity rivers. The peripheral tunnels will be good for agribusiness, water privateers, oil companies and the 1 percent, but will be bad for the fish, wildlife, people and environment of California and the public trust.The Delta smelt may already be extinct in the wild!In fact, the endangered Delta smelt, once the most abundant fish in the entire Bay Delta Estuary, may already be extinct, according to UC Davis fish biologist and author Peter Moyle, as quoted on Capital Public Radio.“Prepare for the extinction of the Delta Smelt in the wild,” Moyle told a group of scientists with the Delta Stewardship Council.According to Capital Public Radio:“He says the latest state trawl survey found very few fish in areas of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where smelt normally gather.‘That trawl survey came up with just six smelt, four females and two males,’ says Moyle. “Normally because they can target smelt, they would have gotten several hundred.’Moyle says the population of Delta smelt has been declining for the last 30 years but the drought may have pushed the species to the point of no return. If the smelt is officially declared extinct, which could take several years, the declaration could change how water is managed in California.‘All these biological opinions on Delta smelt that have restricted some of the pumping will have to be changed,’ says Moyle.But Moyle says pumping water from the Delta to Central and Southern California could still be restricted at certain times because of all the other threatened fish populations.”The Delta smelt, an indicator species that demonstrates the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, reached a new record low population level in 2014, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s fall midwater trawl survey that was released in January.Department staff found a total of only eight smelt at a total of 100 sites sampled each month from September through DecemberThe smelt is considered an indicator species because the 2.0 to 2.8 inch long fish is endemic to the estuary and spends all of its life in the Delta.The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has conducted the Fall Midwater Trawl Survey (FMWT) to index the fall abundance of pelagic (open water) fish, including Delta smelt, striped bass, longfin smelt, threadfin shad and American shad, nearly annually since 1967. The index of each species is a number that indicates a relative population abundance.Watch Nestle’s CEO declare water “food that should be privatized, and not a human right”:‪James Grant Matkin Water shortage is a myth because the real problem is the price of water. Pricing of water today is totally irrelevant to supply and demand. This is very strange because water management is a utility, whether public or private it is inherently a monopoly. This means water utilities could easily charge much higher prices than they do today. But they do not. "Underpriced water sends the wrong signal to the people using it: It tells them not to worry about how much they use. Low prices lead to shortages...If water was priced to reflect scarcity, a decrease in supply would lead to an increase in price and people would demand less." See Forbes story by David Zetland, 2008. Therefore, Nestle are not criminals but water utilities are fools. The Utilities must restructure water sales based on competitive consumer demand to ensure the buyers are not "stealing water" during droughts. While water pricing could be like oil and gold and much better because water is renewable resource. With market pricing integrity water owners like British Columbia could indeed enjoy a bonanza by pricing according to demand rather than giving water away to the Nestles of the corporate world. California also could benefit from water exports from BC where 99% of water ends up in the ocean. If BC priced their water resource properly accounting for environmental sustainability exporting to California would make sense. California is a desert never intended by nature to serve the water demands of a population larger than Canada.http://www.globalresearch.ca/nestle-continues-stealing-worlds-water-during-drought/5438880Nestle CEO: Water Is Not A Human Right, Should Be PrivatizedJanuary 14, 2017 Winter Watch Around the Web, Business, International News 0Nestle Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe. PHOTO: via ACCMagazine13 January 2016ACC MAGAZINE — Is water a free and basic human right, or should all the water on the planet belong to major corporations and be treated as a product? Should the poor who cannot afford to pay these said corporations suffer from starvation due to their lack of financial wealth? According to the former CEO and now Chairman of the largest food product manufacturer in the world, corporations should own every drop of water on the planet — and you’re not getting any unless you pay up.The company notorious for sending out hordes of ‘internet warriors’ to defend the company and its actions online in comments and message boards (perhaps we’ll find some below) even takes a firm stance behind Monsanto’s GMOs and their ‘proven safety’. In fact, the former Nestle CEO actually says that his idea of water privatization is very similar to Monsanto’s GMOs. In a video interview, Nestle Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe states that there has never been ‘one illness’ ever caused from the consumption of GMOs.The way in which this sociopath clearly has zero regard for the human race outside of his own wealth and the development of Nestle, who has been caught funding attacks against GMO labeling, can be witnessed when watching and listening to his talk on the issue. This is a company that actually goes into struggling rural areas and extracts the groundwater for their bottled water products, completely destroying the water supply of the area without any compensation. In fact, they actually make rural areas in the United States foot the bill. […]The Cost of Water: Why It Keeps Going UpNovember 20, 2015The cost of water keeps going up as most facility managers know. In fact, in many cases, the cost of water is going up very significantly, with even higher costs anticipated in the future. For instance, in Chicago, the cost of water went up an average of 25 percent in 2012, and plans are now being discussed to double rates in 2015.So why is the cost of water escalating so fast? After all, historically it has been one of our least expensive natural resources in the United States. However, water has typically been underpriced for decades. Utility companies are now trying to adjust charges so that they better reflect the actual costs to collect, store, and deliver water to consumers.But there are other reasons as well. According to engineers Willa Kuh and Fred Betz with Affiliated Engineers, the following are seven other reasons why the cost of water is going up in the United States:Old infrastructure. According to Kuh and Betz, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports we will need about $350 billion to improve water infrastructure by 2026. Other estimates indicate that by 2050 as much as $1 billion may be needed. As a result, charges are going up now to address these infrastructure updates.Loss of Federal funds. For decades, the Federal government paid the lion’s share of the costs to collect and deliver water. It is now turning these costs over to the states.Accounting changes. In order to avoid raising taxes, communities are shifting the costs of supplying and maintaining water systems from property taxes to utility bills.Demographics. The areas of the country that are now growing the fastest are the same ones facing the greatest water challenges. This includes the Sun Belt states and many Western states.Reduced access to clean water. The number of rivers, streams, lakes, and other water sources that can be accessed has been reduced in the past few years due to pollution and related issues.Climate change. While engineers do not call it climate change, they do indicate there has been “a reduction in snowmelt supply to water resources [which] frustrates demand for water to support human health, food, and energy needs.”Supply and demand. Basic economics is playing a role. As supplies dwindle, costs go up. This applies to water as well.This leaves facility managers with two choices:1. Pay ever-increasing costs for water and try to pass these costs on to building tenants.2. Find effective ways to conserve water such as low flow and no flow restroom fixtures.For both the short- and long-term, the only real option managers have to adjust to the rising cost of water is to find ways to reduce water consumption. Waterless urinals are one way to accomplish this.The Cost of Water: Why It Keeps Going UpPOLITICSWater war in California: Two agencies fight over Colorado River drought plan with a crucial deadline loomingPUBLISHED FRI, MAR 15 2019 • 2:03 PM EDTJeff Daniels@JEFFDANIELSCAKEY POINTSCalifornia remains a holdout on a drought emergency plan for the Colorado River that is due next Tuesday by seven river states.Holding up the plan has been a fight between two powerful water agencies in Southern California.The plan is designed to produce voluntary cuts that would keep the river and Lake Mead from reaching critically low levels.The Colorado River typically accounts for about 25 percent of the water needs of Southern California, but during periods of severe drought it can be a much larger share.HOOVER DAM, AZ - MARCH 30: A ‘bathtub ring’ surrounds Lake Mead near Hoover Dam, which impounds the Colorado River at the Arizona-Nevada border, on March 30, 2016. The white ring shows the effects of a drought which has caused the level of the lake to drop to an historic low. The ring is white because of the minerals which were deposited on the previously submerged surfaces. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)Robert Alexander | Archive Photos | Getty ImagesLOS ANGELES — California remains a holdout on a drought emergency plan for the Colorado River that is due next Tuesday by all seven river states. Holding up the plan has been a fight between two powerful water agencies in Southern California.The drought contingency plan is designed to produce voluntary cuts that would keep the river and Lake Mead from reaching critically low levels. If the plan doesn’t get finalized, the federal government could step in and force mandatory cutbacks instead of voluntary ones for a river that serves 40 million people and some 5 million acres of farmland.Drought in the past decade has stressed the Colorado River to the limits and contributed to Lake Mead reaching perilously low levels. Lake Mead, located by Hoover Dam and a vital water source for California, Nevada and Arizona, had dismal levels last year that raised alarm.“We have a supply crisis that has been developing due to drought on the Colorado River,” said Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a water wholesaler serving 19 million in six counties, including Los Angeles and San Diego.The need for water led Metropolitan last year to approve funding to help pay some of the costs for a delta water-delivery tunnel project in Northern California that would bring more water to Southern California. But Gov. Gavin Newsom last month said he would scale back the $10 billion plan championed by his predecessor.Newsom appoints members to an agency’s board that represents the state in discussions and negotiations on river issues: the Colorado River Board of California.Earlier this month, Imperial Irrigation District, a water district in California’s southeastern Imperial County with senior rights to the Colorado River, announced a plan with water cutbacks. But it required that the federal government pay $200 million for restoring the dwindling Salton Sea, California’s largest lake.“Our job here is to protect the people and the environment of the Imperial Valley,” said Robert Schettler, a spokesman for the Imperial district. He said the Salton Sea has become a health and environmental concern due to dust exposed by the receding lake.However, the Imperial County agency’s demand for federal funds as part of its plan didn’t go over well with Metropolitan. The Los Angeles-based agency contends Imperial’s condition for money would be unlikely to be met before the federal deadline.“We gave [Imperial Irrigation District] time and space to continue to work on their Salton Sea issue, but at some point we felt we needed to move on,” said Kightlinger.The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation asked governors or their representatives of the river states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming to turn in the emergency drought plan for the Colorado River no later than March 19. Approvals from a handful of water agencies in California and Congress are what’s left for the plan to become fully implemented.The Colorado River typically accounts for about 25 percent of the water needs of Southern California, but during periods of severe drought the river can represent more than 50 percent of the region’s water supply. The Las Vegas area gets nearly 90 percent of its water needs from the river system, and Arizona roughly 40 percent.On Tuesday, Metropolitan’s board of directors agreed to bear most of the state’s water cutbacks as a way to prevent Lake Mead from reaching critically low levels. The agency could contribute as much as 700,000 acre-feet of water, or the equivalent of enough water for 2.1 million households for a year.California is only required to make contributions if Lake Mead’s elevation drops to 1,045 feet above sea level, or 44 feet below its current level of 1,089 feet.Lake Mead, which supplies water to cities and agriculture areas, has a more than 50 percent chance of reaching dangerously low elevations in the next few years, according to Metropolitan. If that happens, it said “severe delivery cuts could be triggered, hydropower generation would be threatened and Metropolitan could be prevented from accessing conserved water it has stored in the lake.”“The key part for California is that once a shortage is declared, they still have some access to taking water out of Lake Mead,” said Michael Cohen, senior researcher at the Pacific Institute, an Oakland-based think tank that studies water issues.Added Cohen, “If Metropolitan didn’t sign on to the agreement, when a shortage is declared (which could happen next year), Metropolitan could not access that water. So by signing on, they still have the ability to withdraw water that they’ve stored previously.”TRENDING NOWGoogle announces Stadia streaming game platform in effort to upend the $140 billion game marketThere’s a business growing within Amazon that could one day be worth more than retail or cloudAOC’s approval rating falls after Amazon deal collapse, while Trump hammers Dems over ‘socialism’Prosecutors offer deal to drop prostitution solicitation case against Patriots owner Kraft: WSJStocks whipsaw on conflicting trade deal reports, Dow now 100 points higherWater war in California: Agencies fight over drought emergency plan with crucial deadline loomingEnormous Aquifer Discovered Under Greenland Ice SheetAnthony Watts / December 23, 2013An ice core segment extracted from the aquifer by Koenig’s team, with trapped water collecting at the lower left of the core.Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Ludovic BruckerFrom NASA, I had to laugh at this statement:The water in the aquifer has the potential to raise global sea level by 0.016 inches (0.4 mm).That’s assuming it can get out sometime in the distant future. Greenland’s topography under the ice is bowl shaped.===================================Buried underneath compacted snow and ice in Greenland lies a large liquid water reservoir that has now been mapped by researchers using data from NASA’s Operation IceBridge airborne campaign.A team of glaciologists serendipitously found the aquifer while drilling in southeast Greenland in 2011 to study snow accumulation. Two of their ice cores were dripping water when the scientists lifted them to the surface, despite air temperatures of minus 4 F (minus 20 C). The researchers later used NASA’s Operation Icebridge radar data to confine the limits of the water reservoir, which spreads over 27,000 square miles (69,930 square km) – an area larger than the state of West Virginia. The water in the aquifer has the potential to raise global sea level by 0.016 inches (0.4 mm).“When I heard about the aquifer, I had almost the same reaction as when we discovered Lake Vostok [in Antarctica]: it blew my mind that something like that is possible,” said Michael Studinger, project scientist for Operation IceBridge, a NASA airborne campaign studying changes in ice at the poles. “It turned my view of the Greenland ice sheet upside down – I don’t think anyone had expected that this layer of liquid water could survive the cold winter temperatures without being refrozen.”Southeast Greenland is a region of high snow accumulation. Researchers now believe that the thick snow cover insulates the aquifer from cold winter surface temperatures, allowing it to remain liquid throughout the year. The aquifer is fed by meltwater that percolates from the surface during the summer.The new research is being presented in two papers: one led by University of Utah’s Rick Forster that was published on Dec. 22 in the journal Nature Geoscience and one led by NASA’s Lora Koenig that has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The findings will significantly advance the understanding of how melt water flows through the ice sheet and contributes to sea level rise.When a team led by Forster accidentally drilled into water in 2011, they weren’t able to continue studying the aquifer because their tools were not suited to work in an aquatic environment. Afterward, Forster’s team determined the extent of the aquifer by studying radar data from Operation IceBridge together with ground-based radar data. The top of the water layer clearly showed in the radar data as a return signal brighter than the ice layers.Koenig, a glaciologist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., co-led another expedition to southeast Greenland with Forster in April 2013 specifically designed to study the physical characteristics of the newly discovered water reservoir. Koenig’s team extracted two cores of firn (aged snow) that were saturated with water. They used a water-resistant thermoelectric drill to study the density of the ice and lowered strings packed with temperature sensors down the holes, and found that the temperature of the aquifer hovers around 32 F (zero C), warmer than they had expected it to be.Koenig and her team measured the top of the aquifer at around 39 feet (12 meters) under the surface. This was the depth at which the boreholes filled with water after extracting the ice cores. They then determined the amount of water in the water-saturated firn cores by comparing them to dry cores extracted nearby. The researchers determined the depth at which the pores in the firn close, trapping the water inside the bubbles – at this point, there is a change in the density of the ice that the scientists can measure. This depth is about 121 feet (37 meters) and corresponds to the bottom of the aquifer. Once Koenig’s team had the density, depth and spatial extent of the aquifer, they were able to come up with an estimated water volume of about 154 billion tons (140 metric gigatons). If this water was to suddenly discharge to the ocean, this would correspond to 0.016 inches (0.4 mm) of sea level rise.Researchers think that the perennial aquifer is a heat reservoir for the ice sheet in two ways: melt water carries heat when it percolates from the surface down the ice to reach the aquifer. And if the trapped water were to refreeze, it would release latent heat. Altogether, this makes the ice in the vicinity of the aquifer warmer, and warmer ice flows faster toward the sea.“Our next big task is to understand how this aquifer is filling and how it’s discharging,” said Koenig. “The aquifer could offset some sea level rise if it’s storing water for long periods of time. For example after the 2012 extreme surface melt across Greenland, it appears that the aquifer filled a little bit. The question now is how does that water leave the aquifer on its way to the ocean and whether it will leave this year or a hundred years from now.”Maria-José Viñas
NASA’s Earth Science News Teamhttp://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/23/enormous-aquifer-discovered-under-greenland-ice-sheet/Will investors develop, like new oil fields, these amazing aquifer’s under the ice or not. Unlikely without a better market based return?

I know that Philadelphia was considered ‘the Northernmost of Southern cities’ in the South before the Civil War and many wealthy Southern families sent their children to school there as well as shop there and sometime transship things there for their brokers. Newport, Rhode Island was a famously popular summer resort for the Southerners too.Philadelphia had more class than Baltimore. It was the capital of the United States in the late 18th century. It had better hospitals, restaurants, hotels and was bigger in size. People of the South preferred it. Remember that White Sulphur Springs in Virginia, Saratoga in New York State were extremely popular Southern resorts, too —- The South before the Civil had money and they liked to spend it.After the Civil War Philadelphia was still an important mecca and at one point was the third largest city in the country. It had huge shipyards, a great port and direct train lines everywhere. Philadelphia cream cheese was named after Philadelphia by the New Yorker that discovered the way to make it because Philadelphia was the ‘city gastronomique’ . The city renowned for it’s fine restaurants and food.Philadelphia is chock-a-block filled with history and has one of the world’s largest city parks. It has many fine museums and fine hotels to cater to all appetites and wishes.Baltimore was founded slightly after Pennsylvania in the 17th century and rapidly became an important Southern City and port. On the eve of the Civil War, Baltimore had the largest free black community in the nation. About 15 schools for black people were operating, including Sabbath schools operated by Methodists, Presbyterians, and Quakers, along with several private academies. All black schools were self-sustaining, receiving no state or local government funds, and whites in Baltimore generally opposed educating the black population, continuing to tax black property holders to maintain schools from which black children were excluded by law. Baltimore's black community, nevertheless, was one of the largest and most divided in America due to this experienceThe Civil War divided Baltimore and Maryland's residents. Much of the social and political elite favored the Confederacy—and indeed owned house slaves. In the 1860 election the city's large German element voted not for Lincoln but for Southern Democrat John Breckinridge. They were less concerned with the abolition of slavery, an issue emphasized by Republicans, and much more with nativism, temperance, and religious beliefs, associated with the Know-Nothing Party and strongly opposed by the Democrats. However the Germans hated slavery and supported the Union.After an incident in, 1861, in which rebel mobs attacked Union soldiers on their way to Washington President Lincoln sent in federal troops under Gen. Ben Butler they seized the city, imposed martial law, and arrested leading Confederate spokesmen. The prisoners were later released and the rail lines reopened, making Baltimore a major Union base during the war.By 1880 manufacturing replaced trade and made the city a nationally important industrial center. The port continued to ship increasing amounts of grain, flour, tobacco, and raw cotton to Europe. The new industries of men's clothing, canning, tin and sheet-iron ware products, foundry and machine shop products, cars, and tobacco manufacture had the largest labor force and largest product value.The Great Baltimore fire of 1904 destroyed 70 blocks and 1,526 buildings in the downtown, and led to systematic urban renewal programs. Baltimore was a poorly managed city in 1890, despite its economic vitality. Already ,other big cities throughout America were moving to modernize their public works infrastructures and to support the construction of technologically sophisticated sewer and water systems systems. Baltimore lagged behind the other American metropolises because of its culture of privatism and the politicization of its municipal administration.Baltimore was a major war production center in WWII. The biggest operations were Bethlehem Steel's Fairfield Yard, on the southeastern edge of the harbor, which built Liberty ships; its work force peaked at 46,700 in late 1943. Even larger was Glenn Martin an aircraft plant located 10 miles (16 km) northeast of downtown. By late 1943 about 150,000 to 200,000 migrant war workers had arrived. They were predominantly poor white southerners.In 1950, the city's population topped out at 950,000 people, of whom 24 percent were black. Then the white flight movement began in earnest, and the population inside the city limits steadily declined and became proportionately more black. Between 1950 and 1990, Baltimore's population declined by more than 200,000. The center of gravity has since shifted away from manufacturing and trade to service and knowledge industries, such as medicine and finance. Gentrification by well-educated newcomers has transformed the Harbor area into an upscale tourist destination.On September 19, 2016 the Baltimore City Council approved a $660 million bond deal for the $5.5 billion Port Covington redevelopment project championed by Under Armour founder Kevin Plank and his real estate company Sagamore Development. The waterfront development that includes the new headquarters for Under Armour, as well as shops, housing, offices, and manufacturing spaces is projected to create 26,500 permanent jobs with a $4.3 billion annual economic impact