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Re: Fallout From SMART G.M.'s Televised Self-Debate Continues
Author: Commenter
Date: 11-23-2016 - 16:46
Ok, so every time Mike Arnold's name comes up he is called an economist... and that is supposed to mean that he has great knowledge of railroading. So what is his experience? There are two parts:
1) He has a PhD in economics. He has specialized in the quality of bank accounts. The companies he has worked for and the one he helped found provide:
"ALCO’s proprietary account attrition methodology ties to bank’s near-real-time balances and provides attrition vectors that are granular, transparent and synced to the bank’s evolving deposit and customer depositor mix.
Our deposit rate modeling approach transcends the traditional historical fit-econometric" methodology to give you control of the deposit pricing variables that matter. We provide the tools to visualize your deposit pricing structure and to target pricing, and to monitor depositor-level behavior which accounts for within bank deposit management with a true firm-wide liquidity measure."
and
"DDA Analytics is a growing family of deposit analytics designed to support both stand-alone risk processes and full balance sheet modeling. We support real-time, data-driven measurement, monitoring and management. We call it 'streamlining'."
and
"Principal in consulting firm specializing in interest rate risk measurement management; model validation; bank IRR regulations"
Got that?
2)He Hates trains.
2006 - "SMART will never obtain the required two-thirds voter approval for a sales tax increase to fund it," said Mike Arnold of Novato, co-chairman of Marin Citizens for Effective Transportation.
2007 - "From a legal point of view, SMART is obligated to do an environmental study based on the number of freight trains NCRA will ultimately be operating during the next 20 years, all the way to Port Eureka," said Mike Arnold, co-chairman of the Marin Coalition for Effective Transportation.
2007 - A nice letter to the editor from a railroader:
----
Editor:
As the President of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad Co. (NWP), the freight operator, I'd like to set the record straight on Mike Arnold's May 9th letter about rail freight service on the NWP. Clearly, Mike is not a railroader, as his claims aren't even remotely accurate.
First, only a non-railroader would propose to operate 10 trains of 25 cars each per day, as Mike Arnold has done. Even if 250 carloads of rock were available to NWP (and it's not), operating only 3-4 trains per day would be the usual railroad practice. Second, as the Advance article correctly reported, I currently expect to move only about 2,000 carloads a year on only one train in each direction three days a week. Other traffic, including six solid waste trains in each direction per week, may materialize in the future, but I can't count on it now. Third, I have no intention of operating any of those trains, except possibly the solid waste trains, at night. Fourth, Roger Green of Evergreen Natural Resources is not now nor has he ever been a member of NWP Co.'s Board of Directors. Fifth, NWP will operate freight service whether or not SMART ever runs, although both services are important to the public.
Today, all 2,000 of the carloads I expect to move on NWP freight trains are being trucked through Novato on California Highway 37 and U.S. Highway 101 to and from reload centers in the American Canyon area and rail customers located in Sonoma County. Because it takes four truck loads to handle the larger volumes in each rail carload, the inability to provide rail service on the NWP has produced 8,000 loaded, 8,000 empty, and 16,000 total truck movements through Novato each year. If the solid waste trains do not operate, another 37,500 trucks will be added to the highways each year. I have not seen or heard any Mike Arnold objections to such large increases in truck traffic.
Less energy consumption, lower pollution, a smaller carbon emission footprint, reduced highway congestion and fewer accidents are the public benefits that re-introduction of NWP rail freight will mean to Novato.
What Mike Arnold favors instead is dumping more and more trucks on Marin's and California's highways. For an environmentally friendly world, NWP freight service is the superior alternative - the Green Train Way.
John H. Williams
Palo Alto
----
Meanwhile, critics doubt there's enough business to support North Bay freight service, which gets no subsidy from the rail authority.
"It's not economically viable," said Mike Arnold of Marin Citizens for Effective Transportation.
The railroad is so thinly capitalized that it couldn't survive another storm, he said. "They should be honest with the public," Arnold said. "There's no additional state funding out there."
Still, the project has backing from Sonoma County's agriculture industry, said Lex McCorvey, executive director of the county's Farm Bureau.
"Ag is very much looking forward to the return of freight rail service," he said. "It's long overdue."
----
And on and on. He never met a train he didn't like.
1) He has a PhD in economics. He has specialized in the quality of bank accounts. The companies he has worked for and the one he helped found provide:
"ALCO’s proprietary account attrition methodology ties to bank’s near-real-time balances and provides attrition vectors that are granular, transparent and synced to the bank’s evolving deposit and customer depositor mix.
Our deposit rate modeling approach transcends the traditional historical fit-econometric" methodology to give you control of the deposit pricing variables that matter. We provide the tools to visualize your deposit pricing structure and to target pricing, and to monitor depositor-level behavior which accounts for within bank deposit management with a true firm-wide liquidity measure."
and
"DDA Analytics is a growing family of deposit analytics designed to support both stand-alone risk processes and full balance sheet modeling. We support real-time, data-driven measurement, monitoring and management. We call it 'streamlining'."
and
"Principal in consulting firm specializing in interest rate risk measurement management; model validation; bank IRR regulations"
Got that?
2)He Hates trains.
2006 - "SMART will never obtain the required two-thirds voter approval for a sales tax increase to fund it," said Mike Arnold of Novato, co-chairman of Marin Citizens for Effective Transportation.
2007 - "From a legal point of view, SMART is obligated to do an environmental study based on the number of freight trains NCRA will ultimately be operating during the next 20 years, all the way to Port Eureka," said Mike Arnold, co-chairman of the Marin Coalition for Effective Transportation.
2007 - A nice letter to the editor from a railroader:
----
Editor:
As the President of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad Co. (NWP), the freight operator, I'd like to set the record straight on Mike Arnold's May 9th letter about rail freight service on the NWP. Clearly, Mike is not a railroader, as his claims aren't even remotely accurate.
First, only a non-railroader would propose to operate 10 trains of 25 cars each per day, as Mike Arnold has done. Even if 250 carloads of rock were available to NWP (and it's not), operating only 3-4 trains per day would be the usual railroad practice. Second, as the Advance article correctly reported, I currently expect to move only about 2,000 carloads a year on only one train in each direction three days a week. Other traffic, including six solid waste trains in each direction per week, may materialize in the future, but I can't count on it now. Third, I have no intention of operating any of those trains, except possibly the solid waste trains, at night. Fourth, Roger Green of Evergreen Natural Resources is not now nor has he ever been a member of NWP Co.'s Board of Directors. Fifth, NWP will operate freight service whether or not SMART ever runs, although both services are important to the public.
Today, all 2,000 of the carloads I expect to move on NWP freight trains are being trucked through Novato on California Highway 37 and U.S. Highway 101 to and from reload centers in the American Canyon area and rail customers located in Sonoma County. Because it takes four truck loads to handle the larger volumes in each rail carload, the inability to provide rail service on the NWP has produced 8,000 loaded, 8,000 empty, and 16,000 total truck movements through Novato each year. If the solid waste trains do not operate, another 37,500 trucks will be added to the highways each year. I have not seen or heard any Mike Arnold objections to such large increases in truck traffic.
Less energy consumption, lower pollution, a smaller carbon emission footprint, reduced highway congestion and fewer accidents are the public benefits that re-introduction of NWP rail freight will mean to Novato.
What Mike Arnold favors instead is dumping more and more trucks on Marin's and California's highways. For an environmentally friendly world, NWP freight service is the superior alternative - the Green Train Way.
John H. Williams
Palo Alto
----
Meanwhile, critics doubt there's enough business to support North Bay freight service, which gets no subsidy from the rail authority.
"It's not economically viable," said Mike Arnold of Marin Citizens for Effective Transportation.
The railroad is so thinly capitalized that it couldn't survive another storm, he said. "They should be honest with the public," Arnold said. "There's no additional state funding out there."
Still, the project has backing from Sonoma County's agriculture industry, said Lex McCorvey, executive director of the county's Farm Bureau.
"Ag is very much looking forward to the return of freight rail service," he said. "It's long overdue."
----
And on and on. He never met a train he didn't like.
