I’m sorry, they complain about emissions from trains? The electric Amtrak trains? From within a tunnel? While they’re surrounded by streets will all kinds of car traffic? Freight trains are routed the long way around the city btw.
I don’t know the specifics of this project, but not all Amtrak trains are electric, they also run diesel and dual mode (diesel/electric) trains (I’m pretty sure, but not certain that the northeast corridor is all electric)
There’s also other things worth considering like emissions from construction or maintenance vehicles, some lines are used for freight and passenger rail, construction might stir up any crap that might be in the soil, I suspect there’s some amount of metal dust created by the constant grinding of wheels on rails, plastics from brakes and such, leaks from any hydraulics onboard the train, refrigerant leaking from the air conditioning, etc.
In the grand scheme, even if they’re running straight diesel trains, leaking fluids, asbestos brake pads, etc. it’s probably all negligible in emissions compared to just living in Baltimore, maybe even offset if it leads to more people using Amtrak instead of driving but all of it is still worth considering.
This project is exclusively electric. But overall, yeah, I think trains are way way less worry than the cars that are already there
Just to add of awareness, people are underestimating the micro plastics from tires.
That doesn’t appear to be good journalism. The article does not mention that the reason they want to move the location of the tunnel is to remove the biggest bottleneck on the northeast corridor, and redoing the current tunnel location keeps that bottleneck. Removing that bottleneck would have huge benefits to public transit on the eastern seaboard.
Additionally, they mention “train emissions”, but don’t mention that the trains that would use the tunnel are all electric. The only time there would be any emissions would be in the case of a fire, which is very uncommon in passenger trains. The highway and other busy streets in the area are a far bigger problem.
Overall, it seems like standard nimby-ism.
Overall, it seems like standard nimby-ism.
I would agree if the US government didn’t have a history of bulldozing predominantly Black neighborhoods in the name of infrastructure and instantly omitting white affluent neighborhoods.
While this project doesn’t seem to do it at first glance can you blame black ppl of instantly distrusting the US government motives?
Yeah, definitely. Baltimore also has a good record of combatting that in the case of highway 70, too. In this case, though, it’s just tunneling under that neighborhood, not carving a path through it. Oddly enough, further down the track, there are ~20 people getting displaced (might have already happened), but that’s in a different neighborhood, and I think that would have happened no matter where the tunnel was moved.
I don’t like it when underprivileged people get the short end of the stick. It sucks.
But trains are awesome, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to create the infrastructure we desperately need without some people being inconvenienced.
Sure… but in the USA those people have pretty much always been the same communities, time and time again
I dont understand why the title of the article has to start with “black women…”. It’s just weird to me. Is it really specifically black women? Even if it is, how does that add to the content/subject? I don’t get it. It’s just fucking people, members of a neighborhood, mothers who care about their kids. Idk.
Read up on redlining and where the US installed its highways in cities in the 50/60/70s.
In almost every case, they cut right down the middle of a black neighborhood, a neighborhood that people had been forced into living in due to redlining. This of course destroyed the neighborhood, and made any adjacent homes and buisnesses highly undesirable, gutting black and minority wealth again and again and forcing those residents to live next to road/noise pollution.
Leading off by acknowledging that this may be a modern day case of the same practice is why they added a “black woman” to the headline.
I personally read this as a case of nimbyism, as most of their complaints aren’t based on likely issues, but i can understand the distrust the community has for this kind of project.
Amtrak is racist!