Solano Rail
The Solano Rail slide presentation dates to 2003. I never quite know how to characterize it because I was a student at the time but it's not really a student project in that the presentation itself was not done for school.
I was a full-time wife and mom and part-time college student living in Solano County, California and I chose to use the county rail plan as my case study any time a class assignment asked us to use a real world thing. I eventually put all that together in a single document, linked above.
When we were learning to put dollar values on environmental resources, I examined the potential impact of the plan to put a rail station in Suisun Marsh, a protected wetlands. I likely vastly undercounted its value given the potential global impact of damaging critical habitat in the Pacific Flyway.
In addition to using it in classes for my (incomplete) online BS in Environmental Resource Management with a concentration in Housing, I created a map for the project while in GIS School.
I also attended meetings open to the public for local/regional planning efforts. While I was a low-level moderator on Cyburbia, I got feedback on my presentation and my efforts to try to figure out how to promote it from at least two different professional planners.
I tried to figure out how to get it seen locally and/or online. It went nowhere and then I consigned it to a back burner in part because my findings suggested that commuter rail in Solano County wouldn't really be viable until gas prices were above $4/gallon.
July 18, 2020, I created a Reddit to support the project and updated the website for it. That same day I published a post on the website and posted it to both Hacker News and r/UrbanPlanning.
August 23, 2023, I posted this article to the Reddit and updated the sidebar of r/SolanoRail thusly:
So I am wondering why this isn't getting more press and I'm currently developing some information resources related to wetlands restoration, basic water infrastructure and related topics.
I have too many subreddits and too many tiny websites with only a few pages and no ongoing development. I expect to convert r/SolanoRail to a space to vent about whatever strikes my fancy.
Years of trying to figure out how to start a grass roots movement and actually impact development of the Capitol Corridor route through Solano County, California have proven wholly fruitless and pointless. This is being posted as a SAMPLE of my work, in other words the kind of research and writing I'm capable of doing.
1 January 2025
I was a full-time wife and mom and part-time college student living in Solano County, California and I chose to use the county rail plan as my case study any time a class assignment asked us to use a real world thing. I eventually put all that together in a single document, linked above.
When we were learning to put dollar values on environmental resources, I examined the potential impact of the plan to put a rail station in Suisun Marsh, a protected wetlands. I likely vastly undercounted its value given the potential global impact of damaging critical habitat in the Pacific Flyway.
In addition to using it in classes for my (incomplete) online BS in Environmental Resource Management with a concentration in Housing, I created a map for the project while in GIS School.
I also attended meetings open to the public for local/regional planning efforts. While I was a low-level moderator on Cyburbia, I got feedback on my presentation and my efforts to try to figure out how to promote it from at least two different professional planners.
I tried to figure out how to get it seen locally and/or online. It went nowhere and then I consigned it to a back burner in part because my findings suggested that commuter rail in Solano County wouldn't really be viable until gas prices were above $4/gallon.
July 18, 2020, I created a Reddit to support the project and updated the website for it. That same day I published a post on the website and posted it to both Hacker News and r/UrbanPlanning.
August 23, 2023, I posted this article to the Reddit and updated the sidebar of r/SolanoRail thusly:
In 2011, the French national railroad gave up on helping California with their high speed rail plan. The French then went to AFRICA. That high speed rail line was finished in 2018 and the French called the Africans they worked with "more politically functional" than California. The current Solano County rail plan may well ruin the Pacific Flyway by doing egregious harm to Suisun Marsh. The world may have words with us at that point as the flyway has GLOBAL implications.Because of my ongoing efforts to do research related to the Solano Rail project, I later tripped across information that I found shocking as someone who was an environmental studies major more than twenty years ago:
- Since the 1700s, the continental US has lost more than half of its total acreage of wetlands. The world has lost more than 85 percent.
- Peatlands cover just 3 percent of the planet’s surface but they store about 30 percent of all land-based carbon, or twice as much as all of the world’s forests combined while taking up far less space. Coastal wetlands remove atmospheric CO2 up to fifty-five times faster than rain forests.
So I am wondering why this isn't getting more press and I'm currently developing some information resources related to wetlands restoration, basic water infrastructure and related topics.
I have too many subreddits and too many tiny websites with only a few pages and no ongoing development. I expect to convert r/SolanoRail to a space to vent about whatever strikes my fancy.
Years of trying to figure out how to start a grass roots movement and actually impact development of the Capitol Corridor route through Solano County, California have proven wholly fruitless and pointless. This is being posted as a SAMPLE of my work, in other words the kind of research and writing I'm capable of doing.
1 January 2025
