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How to Muddy Your Tracks on the Internet
Legal and technology researchers estimate that it would take about a month for Internet users to read the privacy policies of all the Web sites they visit in a year. So in the interest of time, here is the deal: You know that dream where you suddenly realize you’re stark naked? You’re living it whenever you open your browser.
There are no secrets online. That emotional e-mail you sent to your ex, the illness you searched for in a fit of hypochondria, those hours spent watching kitten videos (you can take that as a euphemism if the kitten fits) - can all be gathered to create a defining profile of you.
Your information can then be stored, analyzed, indexed and sold as a commodity to data brokers who in turn might sell it to advertisers, employers, health insurers or credit rating agencies.
And while it’s probably impossible to cloak your online activities fully, you can take steps to do the technological equivalent of throwing on a pair of boxers and a T-shirt. Some of these measures are quite easy and many are free. Of course, the more effort and money you expend, the more concealed you are. The trick is to find the right balance between cost, convenience and privacy.
Before you can thwart the snoopers, you have to know who they are. There are hackers hanging around Wi-Fi hot spots, to be sure. But security experts and privacy advocates said more worrisome were Internet service providers, search engine operators, e-mail suppliers and Web site administrators - particularly if a single entity acts in more than one capacity, like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and AOL. This means they can easily collect and cross-reference your data, that is, match your e-mails with your browsing history, as well as figure out your location and identify all the devices you use to connect to the Internet.
“The worst part is they sell this extremely creepy intrusion as a great boon to your life because they can tailor services to your needs,” said Paul Ohm, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder who specializes in information privacy and computer crime. “But do most people want to give that much away? No.”
He advised logging off sites like Google and Facebook as soon as practicably possible and not using the same provider for multiple functions if you can help it. “If you search on Google, maybe you don’t want to use Gmail for your e-mail,” he said.
If you do not want the content of your e-mail messages examined or analyzed at all, you may want to consider lesser-known free services like HushMail, RiseUp and Zoho, which promote no-snooping policies. Or register your own domain with an associated e-mail address through services like Hover or BlueHost, which cost $55 to $85 a year. You get not only the company’s assurance of privacy but also an address unlike anyone else’s, like me@myowndomain.com.
Or you can forgo trusting others with your e-mail correspondence altogether and set up your own mail server. It is an option that is not just for the paranoid, according to Sam Harrelson, a middle-school teacher and self-described technology aficionado in Asheville, N.C., who switched to using his own mail server this year using a $49.99 OS X Server and $30 SpamSieve software to eliminate junk mail.
“The topic of privacy policies and what lies ahead for our digital footprints is especially fascinating and pertinent for me, since I work with 13- and 14-year-olds who are just beginning to dabble with services such as Gmail and all of Google’s apps, as well as Facebook, Instagram, social gaming,” he said. “I have nothing to hide, but I’m uncomfortable with what we give away.”
But even with your own mail server, Google will still have the e-mails you exchange with friends or colleagues with Gmail accounts, said Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group in San Francisco. “You’re less exposed,” he said. “But you can’t totally escape.”
Another shrouding tactic is to use the search engine DuckDuckGo, which distinguishes itself with a “We do not track or bubble you!” policy. Bubbling is the filtering of search results based on your search history. (Bubbling also means you are less likely to see opposing points of view or be exposed to something fresh and new.)
Regardless of which search engine you use, security experts recommend that you turn on your browser’s “private mode,” usually found under Preferences, Tools or Settings. When this mode is activated, tracking cookies are deleted once you close your browser, which “essentially wipes clean your history,” said Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer with WhiteHat Security, an online security consulting firm in Santa Clara, Calif.
He warned, however, that private mode does nothing to conceal your I.P. address, a unique number that identifies your entry or access point to the Internet. So Web sites may not know your browsing history, but they will probably know who you are and where you are as well as when and how long you viewed their pages.
Shielding your I.P. address is possible by connecting to what is called a virtual private network, or V.P.N., such as those offered by WiTopia, PrivateVPN and StrongVPN. These services, whose prices price from $40 to $90 a year, route your data stream to what is called a proxy server, where it is stripped of your I.P. address before it is sent on to its destination. This obscures your identity not only from Web sites but also from your Internet service provider.
Moreover, these services encrypt data traveling to and from their servers so it looks like gibberish to anyone who might be monitoring wireless networks in places like coffee shops, airports and hotels.
While V.P.N. providers generally have strict privacy policies, Moxie Marlinspike, an independent security researcher and software developer in San Francisco, said, “It’s better to trust the design of the system rather than an organization.” In that case, there is Tor, a free service with 36 million users that was originally developed to conceal military communications. Tor encrypts your data stream and bounces it through a series of proxy servers so no single entity knows the source of the data or whence it came. The only drawback is that with all that bouncing around, it is very S-L-O-W.
Free browser add-ons that increase privacy and yet will not interrupt your work flow include Ghostery and Do Not Track Plus, which prevent Web sites from relaying information about you and your visit to tracking companies. These add-ons also name the companies that were blocked from receiving your data (one social network, five advertising companies and six data brokers on a recent visit to CNN.com), which is instructive in itself.
“Companies like Google are creating these enormous databases using your personal information,” said Paul Hill, senior consultant with SystemExperts, a network security company in Sudbury, Mass. “They may have the best of intentions now, but who knows what they will look like 20 years from now, and by then it will be too late to take it all back.”
Freight Train Late? Blame Chicago
When it comes to rail traffic, Chicago is America’s speed bump.
Shippers complain that a load of freight can make its way from Los Angeles to Chicago in 48 hours, then take 30 hours to travel across the city. A recent trainload of sulfur took some 27 hours to pass through Chicago - an average speed of 1.13 miles per hour, or about a quarter the pace of many electric wheelchairs.
With freight volume in the United States expected to grow by more than 80 percent in the next 20 years, delays are projected to only get worse.
The underlying reasons for this sprawling traffic jam are complex, involving history, economics and a nation’s disinclination to improve its roads, bridges and rails.
Six of the nation’s seven biggest railroads pass through the city, a testament to Chicago’s economic might when the rail lines were laid from the 1800s on. Today, a quarter of all rail traffic in the nation touches Chicago. Nearly half of what is known as intermodal rail traffic, the big steel boxes that can be carried aboard ships, trains or trucks, roll by or through this city.
The slowdown involves more than freight. The other day, William C. Thompson, a project manager for the Association of American Railroads, stood next to a crossroads of steel in the Englewood neighborhood pointing to a web of tracks used by freight trains and Amtrak passenger trains that intersected tracks for Metra, Chicago’s commuter rail. The commuter trains get to go first, he said, and so “Amtrak tells me they have more delays here than anywhere else in the system.”
More delays than anywhere else in the Chicago area? No, he said. “In the entire United States.”
Now, federal, state, local and industry officials are completing the early stages of a $3.2 billion project to untangle Chicago’s rail system - not just for its residents, who suffer commuter train delays and long waits in their cars at grade crossings, but for the rest of the nation as well.
The program, called Create (an acronym for Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program), is intended to replace 25 rail intersections with overpasses and underpasses that will smooth the flow of traffic for the 1,300 freight and passenger trains that muscle through the city each day, and to separate tracks now shared by freight and passenger trains at critical spots. Fifty miles of new track will link yards and create a second east-west route across the city, building redundancy into the overburdened system.
Fourteen of the 70 projects have been completed so far, and 12 more are under way, including the $140 million “Englewood flyover,” or overpass.
While much of the country’s attention in transportation issues is focused on high-speed rail projects trumpeted by the Obama administration, Create is largely about bringing old-fashioned low-speed rail up to modern standards. Innovative financing combines federal, state and private money from various programs, including the federal stimulus packages. Create even uses some funds tied to high-speed rail, since many of the projects are being designed to accommodate those lines in the future.
One of the biggest holdups for freight traffic is that Chicago’s crowded rails must also get hundreds of thousands of commuters to work and home mornings and evenings, and so by an agreement known as the Chicago Protocol, the shared tracks and intersections belong to passenger rail during rush hours.
The progress of a few recent trains as measured by the railroads shows how the delays occur. Among them was a coal train traveling 1,100 miles east from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming.
The train reached Chicago in 60 hours; its average speed, with delays for traffic control and a delivery schedule on the first leg, was 18 miles per hour. Within the “corral” of the greater Chicago area, the average speed dropped to 3.9 miles per hour, the pace of a rapid walk. It took more than 10 hours to move the 40 miles across the city. It had to stop completely on the outskirts of town during commuter rush hours and wait its turn at “interlockings” - go-slow rail intersections like the one at Englewood. Once outside Chicago, the train’s average leapt to 36 miles per hour.
Some of the causes of delay might have seemed outdated in the 20th century, much less the 21st, like manual switches that engineers have to throw after their trains have passed. Create is replacing them with electronic switches and online traffic control networks, but until then engineers at some points have to get out of their cabins, walk the length of the train back to the switch - a mile or more - operate the switch, and then trudge back to their place at the head of the train before setting out again.
Chicago had lived with its rail anachronisms and idiosyncrasies for decades, but everything fell apart in a 1999 blizzard that paralyzed the city’s rails and backed up train traffic across the United States for months.
“The traffic just kept coming and coming and coming,” said David Grewe, a supervisor for Union Pacific Railroad. “We basically waited for the spring thaw.”
The resulting plan to fix its rail problems started with efforts to reduce delays by improving coordination among the six freight rail companies, an effort that includes Mr. Grewe, as well as Metra and Amtrak. “You would have thought that coordination would have taken place in the past,” Mr. Grewe said. “Unfortunately, it didn’t.”
Mr. Thompson, the rail association’s program manager for Create, said that building during a recession had produced a bonus, as construction companies eager to get the work have come in under budget on every project. “It’s a very good time to be building infrastructure,” he said.
With more than a dozen of the smaller projects in place, rail officials say they have already seen some reduction in delays, said Joe Shachter, director of public and intermodal transportation for the Illinois Department of Transportation, with bigger improvements to come. “The next two or three years in particular we think are going to show great advances,” he said.
But the full benefits will be felt only if all of the projects can be completed, Mr. Thompson said: a knot of interrelated problems requires a network of solutions.
And there lies a potentially larger problem than anything in the steel rails that snake across the city. While some of the financing for Create has come from private industry and state bonds, further progress depends almost entirely on the ability of Congress to pass transportation legislation. That legislation has historically been passed in a bipartisan manner. But Congress, eager to squeeze the budget and in continual disagreement about the nation’s priorities, has found itself repeatedly at an impasse over the current transportation bill.
To Brian Imus, staff director of Illinois PIRG, a consumer group, “it seems like as much gridlock as we’ve got with our trains, it’s even worse in Washington, D.C.”
Herd’s Fate Lies in Preservation Clash
Come summer, the beaches of this barrier island will be choked with cars and sunbathers, but in the off-season the land is left to wild horses. Smallish, tending toward chestnut and black, they wander past deserted vacation rentals in harems of five or six.
Thousands of them once roamed the length of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the likely descendants from mounts that belonged to Spanish explorers five centuries ago. Now their numbers have dwindled to a few hundred, the best known living on federal parkland at Shackleford Banks.
But the largest herd, which has recently grown to almost 140 strong, occupies more than 7,500 acres of narrow land that stretches from the end of Highway 12 in Corolla (pronounced cor-AH-la) to the Virginia border, 11 miles north. Lacking natural predators, and trapped by fences that jut into the choppy Atlantic, the herd is becoming so inbred that its advocates fear a genetic collapse in mere generations.
These supporters are leading a campaign to save the Corolla herd, and they have powerful allies in Congress. In February, the House passed a bill that would sustain the herd at about 120 and allow the importing of new mares from Shackleford for an introduction of fresh genes.
Wildlife conservationists say the issue is not so simple. The beaches, marshes, grasslands and forests near Corolla are a stopover for flocks of endangered migratory birds, and nesting ground for sea turtles. Much of the horses’ range belongs to the Currituck National Wildlife Refuge, and defenders of the native habitat fear the herd’s current size strains the ecosystem.
The future of the horses raises larger questions about whether one animal should be preserved at the expense of others - and who gets to decide.
“This is about values,” said Michael Hutchins, executive director of the Wildlife Society, representing wildlife biologists and managers, which opposes the House measure. “I like horses; I think they are fascinating animals. I also deeply value what little we have left of our native species and their habitats.”
Both sides invoke science to their cause. But data are sparse and a comprehensive study of the horses’ impact is not expected before next year.
In the arena of political and public sentiment, the horses win hands down. Bonds between horse and human have existed for centuries; it is the animal that has pulled plows, and carried armies and settlers forward in the name of civilization.
“God has put such a beautiful thing here - how can you not want to protect them?” said Betty Lane, 70, who has lived here for more than 40 years, driving her S.U.V. as part of a citizen patrol to protect the horses. (She stopped after mistaking a reporter for a tourist trying to get too close to the horses, in defiance of local law.) She wore a necklace bearing the name Spec, for a stallion killed by a hit-and-run driver on the beach.
Dedication to wild horses runs so deep here and elsewhere that many supporters even chafe at the notion of calling the animals “non-native,” citing fossil records that horses lived in North America more than 11,000 years ago before going extinct along other Pleistocene creatures like mastodons.
The wild horses of Corolla did not arise here, but they are domestic animals that have lost their domesticity. Though skeptics question whether the horses are indeed Spanish, an inspection from the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and other groups has noted the horses’ short backs, low-set tails and other traits that make them distinct from other North American stock. A DNA analysis published February in Animal Genetics also points to a common origin for the horses, suggesting they may be a living relic of an Iberian breed that exists nowhere else.
The study also confirms fears that the horses are growing perilously inbred. “There are wild herds with lower diversity, but not many,” said Gus Cothran, an expert in equine genetics at Texas A&M University who is lead author of the report. He says a herd of 60 could survive, provided a new mare entered the group every generation (about eight years). The federal bill sets a herd size at 110 to 130, the minimum number Dr. Cothran says could slow genetic erosion if the horses remain isolated.
“We are not asking for hundreds of horses,” said Karen McCalpin, director of the Corolla Wild Horse Fund, which protects and cares for the horses, and leads public education about them. The heart of the disagreement with wildlife conservationists is over how many horses the habitat can bear. “If they were that detrimental for the environment,” she asked, “wouldn’t that be evident by now?”
This question would be easier to answer if not for the matter of people. Other herds of Outer Banks horses live in expanses largely free of human intrusion. But the Corolla horses mostly live off people’s land and landscaping. Tourism promoters like to show horses frolicking in sand and surf, their manes blowing majestically, but these animals are just as likely to be spotted grazing alongside driveways.
Genetics aside, tourists pose the biggest threat to the herd, whether from collisions with distracted drivers, or from photo-seeking vacationers who flout local code that makes it a crime to feed or get within 50 feet of a horse. Last summer a 2-week-old colt died of an intestinal blockage after eating watermelon rinds fed to it by visitors.
As Corolla becomes more densely developed, the horses could be pushed more and more onto land set aside for wildlife sanctuaries. Last summer, out of concern for a species of bird called black rail, Mike Hoff, the refuge manager, fenced off a 135-acre swath of marshland after noting too many seasons of depleted grass. “It wasn’t that we wanted to exclude the horses because we don’t like them,” he said.
One of the few studies to examine the horses’ direct impact was published in 2004 in The Journal of Range Management. Researchers from East Carolina University reported that in general, plants on Corolla recovered from one season of grazing by early the following summer. But the data were gathered in 1997, when the horse population was estimated at 43, spread across 11,400 acres. Today, the range is almost 4,000 acres smaller and the herd size has more than tripled.
The continuing study of feral animals, financed jointly by the federal Fish and Wildlife Service and North Carolina State University, is intended to measure the effect of hogs and deer in addition to horses. Teasing out the horses’ impact “is a difficult question,” said Chris DePerno, who is leading the research, but he added, “We think we’ve designed a very, very good study.”
In this case, politics and science may be operating on separate timetables. The Senate could take up the bill before Dr. DePerno’s study is complete. Ms. McCalpin lamented that the horses were already bearing hallmarks of genetic failure, with an occasional foal born astoundingly small, or with back knees that lock instead of hinge.
“Time is running out,” she said, adding: “They’ve been here for five centuries. It makes me sad to think they might not be here for more.”
Is Traffic Making Us Lonely?
Kids Who Get Driven Everywhere Don't Know Where They're Going
On the invention of jaywalking
Legal and technology researchers estimate that it would take about a month for Internet users to read the privacy policies of all the Web sites they visit in a year. So in the interest of time, here is the deal: You know that dream where you suddenly realize you’re stark naked? You’re living it whenever you open your browser.
There are no secrets online. That emotional e-mail you sent to your ex, the illness you searched for in a fit of hypochondria, those hours spent watching kitten videos (you can take that as a euphemism if the kitten fits) - can all be gathered to create a defining profile of you.
Your information can then be stored, analyzed, indexed and sold as a commodity to data brokers who in turn might sell it to advertisers, employers, health insurers or credit rating agencies.
And while it’s probably impossible to cloak your online activities fully, you can take steps to do the technological equivalent of throwing on a pair of boxers and a T-shirt. Some of these measures are quite easy and many are free. Of course, the more effort and money you expend, the more concealed you are. The trick is to find the right balance between cost, convenience and privacy.
Before you can thwart the snoopers, you have to know who they are. There are hackers hanging around Wi-Fi hot spots, to be sure. But security experts and privacy advocates said more worrisome were Internet service providers, search engine operators, e-mail suppliers and Web site administrators - particularly if a single entity acts in more than one capacity, like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and AOL. This means they can easily collect and cross-reference your data, that is, match your e-mails with your browsing history, as well as figure out your location and identify all the devices you use to connect to the Internet.
“The worst part is they sell this extremely creepy intrusion as a great boon to your life because they can tailor services to your needs,” said Paul Ohm, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder who specializes in information privacy and computer crime. “But do most people want to give that much away? No.”
He advised logging off sites like Google and Facebook as soon as practicably possible and not using the same provider for multiple functions if you can help it. “If you search on Google, maybe you don’t want to use Gmail for your e-mail,” he said.
If you do not want the content of your e-mail messages examined or analyzed at all, you may want to consider lesser-known free services like HushMail, RiseUp and Zoho, which promote no-snooping policies. Or register your own domain with an associated e-mail address through services like Hover or BlueHost, which cost $55 to $85 a year. You get not only the company’s assurance of privacy but also an address unlike anyone else’s, like me@myowndomain.com.
Or you can forgo trusting others with your e-mail correspondence altogether and set up your own mail server. It is an option that is not just for the paranoid, according to Sam Harrelson, a middle-school teacher and self-described technology aficionado in Asheville, N.C., who switched to using his own mail server this year using a $49.99 OS X Server and $30 SpamSieve software to eliminate junk mail.
“The topic of privacy policies and what lies ahead for our digital footprints is especially fascinating and pertinent for me, since I work with 13- and 14-year-olds who are just beginning to dabble with services such as Gmail and all of Google’s apps, as well as Facebook, Instagram, social gaming,” he said. “I have nothing to hide, but I’m uncomfortable with what we give away.”
But even with your own mail server, Google will still have the e-mails you exchange with friends or colleagues with Gmail accounts, said Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group in San Francisco. “You’re less exposed,” he said. “But you can’t totally escape.”
Another shrouding tactic is to use the search engine DuckDuckGo, which distinguishes itself with a “We do not track or bubble you!” policy. Bubbling is the filtering of search results based on your search history. (Bubbling also means you are less likely to see opposing points of view or be exposed to something fresh and new.)
Regardless of which search engine you use, security experts recommend that you turn on your browser’s “private mode,” usually found under Preferences, Tools or Settings. When this mode is activated, tracking cookies are deleted once you close your browser, which “essentially wipes clean your history,” said Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer with WhiteHat Security, an online security consulting firm in Santa Clara, Calif.
He warned, however, that private mode does nothing to conceal your I.P. address, a unique number that identifies your entry or access point to the Internet. So Web sites may not know your browsing history, but they will probably know who you are and where you are as well as when and how long you viewed their pages.
Shielding your I.P. address is possible by connecting to what is called a virtual private network, or V.P.N., such as those offered by WiTopia, PrivateVPN and StrongVPN. These services, whose prices price from $40 to $90 a year, route your data stream to what is called a proxy server, where it is stripped of your I.P. address before it is sent on to its destination. This obscures your identity not only from Web sites but also from your Internet service provider.
Moreover, these services encrypt data traveling to and from their servers so it looks like gibberish to anyone who might be monitoring wireless networks in places like coffee shops, airports and hotels.
While V.P.N. providers generally have strict privacy policies, Moxie Marlinspike, an independent security researcher and software developer in San Francisco, said, “It’s better to trust the design of the system rather than an organization.” In that case, there is Tor, a free service with 36 million users that was originally developed to conceal military communications. Tor encrypts your data stream and bounces it through a series of proxy servers so no single entity knows the source of the data or whence it came. The only drawback is that with all that bouncing around, it is very S-L-O-W.
Free browser add-ons that increase privacy and yet will not interrupt your work flow include Ghostery and Do Not Track Plus, which prevent Web sites from relaying information about you and your visit to tracking companies. These add-ons also name the companies that were blocked from receiving your data (one social network, five advertising companies and six data brokers on a recent visit to CNN.com), which is instructive in itself.
“Companies like Google are creating these enormous databases using your personal information,” said Paul Hill, senior consultant with SystemExperts, a network security company in Sudbury, Mass. “They may have the best of intentions now, but who knows what they will look like 20 years from now, and by then it will be too late to take it all back.”
Freight Train Late? Blame Chicago
When it comes to rail traffic, Chicago is America’s speed bump.
Shippers complain that a load of freight can make its way from Los Angeles to Chicago in 48 hours, then take 30 hours to travel across the city. A recent trainload of sulfur took some 27 hours to pass through Chicago - an average speed of 1.13 miles per hour, or about a quarter the pace of many electric wheelchairs.
With freight volume in the United States expected to grow by more than 80 percent in the next 20 years, delays are projected to only get worse.
The underlying reasons for this sprawling traffic jam are complex, involving history, economics and a nation’s disinclination to improve its roads, bridges and rails.
Six of the nation’s seven biggest railroads pass through the city, a testament to Chicago’s economic might when the rail lines were laid from the 1800s on. Today, a quarter of all rail traffic in the nation touches Chicago. Nearly half of what is known as intermodal rail traffic, the big steel boxes that can be carried aboard ships, trains or trucks, roll by or through this city.
The slowdown involves more than freight. The other day, William C. Thompson, a project manager for the Association of American Railroads, stood next to a crossroads of steel in the Englewood neighborhood pointing to a web of tracks used by freight trains and Amtrak passenger trains that intersected tracks for Metra, Chicago’s commuter rail. The commuter trains get to go first, he said, and so “Amtrak tells me they have more delays here than anywhere else in the system.”
More delays than anywhere else in the Chicago area? No, he said. “In the entire United States.”
Now, federal, state, local and industry officials are completing the early stages of a $3.2 billion project to untangle Chicago’s rail system - not just for its residents, who suffer commuter train delays and long waits in their cars at grade crossings, but for the rest of the nation as well.
The program, called Create (an acronym for Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program), is intended to replace 25 rail intersections with overpasses and underpasses that will smooth the flow of traffic for the 1,300 freight and passenger trains that muscle through the city each day, and to separate tracks now shared by freight and passenger trains at critical spots. Fifty miles of new track will link yards and create a second east-west route across the city, building redundancy into the overburdened system.
Fourteen of the 70 projects have been completed so far, and 12 more are under way, including the $140 million “Englewood flyover,” or overpass.
While much of the country’s attention in transportation issues is focused on high-speed rail projects trumpeted by the Obama administration, Create is largely about bringing old-fashioned low-speed rail up to modern standards. Innovative financing combines federal, state and private money from various programs, including the federal stimulus packages. Create even uses some funds tied to high-speed rail, since many of the projects are being designed to accommodate those lines in the future.
One of the biggest holdups for freight traffic is that Chicago’s crowded rails must also get hundreds of thousands of commuters to work and home mornings and evenings, and so by an agreement known as the Chicago Protocol, the shared tracks and intersections belong to passenger rail during rush hours.
The progress of a few recent trains as measured by the railroads shows how the delays occur. Among them was a coal train traveling 1,100 miles east from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming.
The train reached Chicago in 60 hours; its average speed, with delays for traffic control and a delivery schedule on the first leg, was 18 miles per hour. Within the “corral” of the greater Chicago area, the average speed dropped to 3.9 miles per hour, the pace of a rapid walk. It took more than 10 hours to move the 40 miles across the city. It had to stop completely on the outskirts of town during commuter rush hours and wait its turn at “interlockings” - go-slow rail intersections like the one at Englewood. Once outside Chicago, the train’s average leapt to 36 miles per hour.
Some of the causes of delay might have seemed outdated in the 20th century, much less the 21st, like manual switches that engineers have to throw after their trains have passed. Create is replacing them with electronic switches and online traffic control networks, but until then engineers at some points have to get out of their cabins, walk the length of the train back to the switch - a mile or more - operate the switch, and then trudge back to their place at the head of the train before setting out again.
Chicago had lived with its rail anachronisms and idiosyncrasies for decades, but everything fell apart in a 1999 blizzard that paralyzed the city’s rails and backed up train traffic across the United States for months.
“The traffic just kept coming and coming and coming,” said David Grewe, a supervisor for Union Pacific Railroad. “We basically waited for the spring thaw.”
The resulting plan to fix its rail problems started with efforts to reduce delays by improving coordination among the six freight rail companies, an effort that includes Mr. Grewe, as well as Metra and Amtrak. “You would have thought that coordination would have taken place in the past,” Mr. Grewe said. “Unfortunately, it didn’t.”
Mr. Thompson, the rail association’s program manager for Create, said that building during a recession had produced a bonus, as construction companies eager to get the work have come in under budget on every project. “It’s a very good time to be building infrastructure,” he said.
With more than a dozen of the smaller projects in place, rail officials say they have already seen some reduction in delays, said Joe Shachter, director of public and intermodal transportation for the Illinois Department of Transportation, with bigger improvements to come. “The next two or three years in particular we think are going to show great advances,” he said.
But the full benefits will be felt only if all of the projects can be completed, Mr. Thompson said: a knot of interrelated problems requires a network of solutions.
And there lies a potentially larger problem than anything in the steel rails that snake across the city. While some of the financing for Create has come from private industry and state bonds, further progress depends almost entirely on the ability of Congress to pass transportation legislation. That legislation has historically been passed in a bipartisan manner. But Congress, eager to squeeze the budget and in continual disagreement about the nation’s priorities, has found itself repeatedly at an impasse over the current transportation bill.
To Brian Imus, staff director of Illinois PIRG, a consumer group, “it seems like as much gridlock as we’ve got with our trains, it’s even worse in Washington, D.C.”
Herd’s Fate Lies in Preservation Clash
Come summer, the beaches of this barrier island will be choked with cars and sunbathers, but in the off-season the land is left to wild horses. Smallish, tending toward chestnut and black, they wander past deserted vacation rentals in harems of five or six.
Thousands of them once roamed the length of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the likely descendants from mounts that belonged to Spanish explorers five centuries ago. Now their numbers have dwindled to a few hundred, the best known living on federal parkland at Shackleford Banks.
But the largest herd, which has recently grown to almost 140 strong, occupies more than 7,500 acres of narrow land that stretches from the end of Highway 12 in Corolla (pronounced cor-AH-la) to the Virginia border, 11 miles north. Lacking natural predators, and trapped by fences that jut into the choppy Atlantic, the herd is becoming so inbred that its advocates fear a genetic collapse in mere generations.
These supporters are leading a campaign to save the Corolla herd, and they have powerful allies in Congress. In February, the House passed a bill that would sustain the herd at about 120 and allow the importing of new mares from Shackleford for an introduction of fresh genes.
Wildlife conservationists say the issue is not so simple. The beaches, marshes, grasslands and forests near Corolla are a stopover for flocks of endangered migratory birds, and nesting ground for sea turtles. Much of the horses’ range belongs to the Currituck National Wildlife Refuge, and defenders of the native habitat fear the herd’s current size strains the ecosystem.
The future of the horses raises larger questions about whether one animal should be preserved at the expense of others - and who gets to decide.
“This is about values,” said Michael Hutchins, executive director of the Wildlife Society, representing wildlife biologists and managers, which opposes the House measure. “I like horses; I think they are fascinating animals. I also deeply value what little we have left of our native species and their habitats.”
Both sides invoke science to their cause. But data are sparse and a comprehensive study of the horses’ impact is not expected before next year.
In the arena of political and public sentiment, the horses win hands down. Bonds between horse and human have existed for centuries; it is the animal that has pulled plows, and carried armies and settlers forward in the name of civilization.
“God has put such a beautiful thing here - how can you not want to protect them?” said Betty Lane, 70, who has lived here for more than 40 years, driving her S.U.V. as part of a citizen patrol to protect the horses. (She stopped after mistaking a reporter for a tourist trying to get too close to the horses, in defiance of local law.) She wore a necklace bearing the name Spec, for a stallion killed by a hit-and-run driver on the beach.
Dedication to wild horses runs so deep here and elsewhere that many supporters even chafe at the notion of calling the animals “non-native,” citing fossil records that horses lived in North America more than 11,000 years ago before going extinct along other Pleistocene creatures like mastodons.
The wild horses of Corolla did not arise here, but they are domestic animals that have lost their domesticity. Though skeptics question whether the horses are indeed Spanish, an inspection from the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and other groups has noted the horses’ short backs, low-set tails and other traits that make them distinct from other North American stock. A DNA analysis published February in Animal Genetics also points to a common origin for the horses, suggesting they may be a living relic of an Iberian breed that exists nowhere else.
The study also confirms fears that the horses are growing perilously inbred. “There are wild herds with lower diversity, but not many,” said Gus Cothran, an expert in equine genetics at Texas A&M University who is lead author of the report. He says a herd of 60 could survive, provided a new mare entered the group every generation (about eight years). The federal bill sets a herd size at 110 to 130, the minimum number Dr. Cothran says could slow genetic erosion if the horses remain isolated.
“We are not asking for hundreds of horses,” said Karen McCalpin, director of the Corolla Wild Horse Fund, which protects and cares for the horses, and leads public education about them. The heart of the disagreement with wildlife conservationists is over how many horses the habitat can bear. “If they were that detrimental for the environment,” she asked, “wouldn’t that be evident by now?”
This question would be easier to answer if not for the matter of people. Other herds of Outer Banks horses live in expanses largely free of human intrusion. But the Corolla horses mostly live off people’s land and landscaping. Tourism promoters like to show horses frolicking in sand and surf, their manes blowing majestically, but these animals are just as likely to be spotted grazing alongside driveways.
Genetics aside, tourists pose the biggest threat to the herd, whether from collisions with distracted drivers, or from photo-seeking vacationers who flout local code that makes it a crime to feed or get within 50 feet of a horse. Last summer a 2-week-old colt died of an intestinal blockage after eating watermelon rinds fed to it by visitors.
As Corolla becomes more densely developed, the horses could be pushed more and more onto land set aside for wildlife sanctuaries. Last summer, out of concern for a species of bird called black rail, Mike Hoff, the refuge manager, fenced off a 135-acre swath of marshland after noting too many seasons of depleted grass. “It wasn’t that we wanted to exclude the horses because we don’t like them,” he said.
One of the few studies to examine the horses’ direct impact was published in 2004 in The Journal of Range Management. Researchers from East Carolina University reported that in general, plants on Corolla recovered from one season of grazing by early the following summer. But the data were gathered in 1997, when the horse population was estimated at 43, spread across 11,400 acres. Today, the range is almost 4,000 acres smaller and the herd size has more than tripled.
The continuing study of feral animals, financed jointly by the federal Fish and Wildlife Service and North Carolina State University, is intended to measure the effect of hogs and deer in addition to horses. Teasing out the horses’ impact “is a difficult question,” said Chris DePerno, who is leading the research, but he added, “We think we’ve designed a very, very good study.”
In this case, politics and science may be operating on separate timetables. The Senate could take up the bill before Dr. DePerno’s study is complete. Ms. McCalpin lamented that the horses were already bearing hallmarks of genetic failure, with an occasional foal born astoundingly small, or with back knees that lock instead of hinge.
“Time is running out,” she said, adding: “They’ve been here for five centuries. It makes me sad to think they might not be here for more.”
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