DanielHolth | Wikimedia Commons

If you’re taking Amtrak on its Montreal-to-New York run, via Albany, you’ll climb aboard the Adirondack. When you leave New York and are headed to Miami, you’ll be riding either the Silver Meteor or the Silver Star. And if you’re riding the rails from Chicago to San Francisco, it’ll be on the California Zephyr.

Such romantic passenger train names are worth considering here in Starville. Because in four short years, maybe fewer, Amtrak will make a triumphant return to Roanoke.

That train will connect Roanoke to Boston and will make stops in Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Providence and other places. Right now the southern terminus is Libertytown – er, Lynchburg – and we must suffer the indignity of a 5:45 a.m. shuttle bus ride to catch it.

Unfortunately, that train currently has a depressingly utilitarian name, the Northeast Regional. Informally, it’s known as the “Lynchburg Train.” Problem is, both monikers have as much creativity and romance as you’d find in Soviet-era bus to suburban Chernobyl.

We can do better. So today, I’m launching the great Name That Train Game. Email your suggestions to me, explaining your idea, and I’ll use the best ones in a future column.

This contest was sparked by “Train Man” Dan Peacock of Manassas, the Old Dominion’s unofficial No. 1 passenger railfan . Before we get to his ideas, here’s a bit of background.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

Howcheng | Wikimedia Commons | Altered by Dan

Your daily Letter to the Columnist — June 12, 2013

Having traveled the Mill Mountain spur since I moved here, I’ve seen the toll that budget cuts have taken on the Blue Ridge Parkway and the road, overlooks, etc.

The first bridge you come to after turning off the BRP, to go towards “THE OVERGLORIFIED STAR” from the BRP, the point of asphalt-to-concrete bridge surface is crazy.

The road has settled so much that I pity the folks (10 speeders, motorcycles, all models of anything that has a wheel, and old folks who can’t lift up their foot more than 2 or so inches) as they drive to the unassuming destination to see the “STAR.”

That transition is not marked in any fashion to alert folks to slow down to 1.75 mph to avoid having to replace all four rims(or two). Pissed me off so much going to Roanoke Memorial Hospital to see my friend Mark, that I came up with a plan. Read more »

Shot by Dan, in 2009, on the Tuesday Night Ride.

Since at least 2002, and probably earlier than that, bicycle riders have gathered at the Virginia Museum of Transportation for a weekly celebration of pedal power.

Known widely as the Tuesday Night Ride, or the Tuesday Night Beer Ride, it’s a 20-mile loop that includes 8 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway, one of the best bike-riding roads anywhere. An average of 40 riders participate, but on warm evenings those numbers can swell to 75 or 80.

Afterwards, many of the riders gather for food and fellowship and beer upstairs at The Cornerstone, a bar on Campbell Avenue. It’s a fun time.

Full disclosure: Though I haven’t participated in a few years, I was one of the Tuesday Night Ride’s earliest organizers. It’s been an official ride of the Blue Ridge Bicycle Club since at least 2003 or 2004, and I was president of that organization in 2006. (I’m no longer a member).

The ride normally kicks off the first Tuesday following daylight savings time, which is today. But last week, Blue Ridge Bicycle Club President Chris Berry pulled the plug, after months of back-and-forth with Blue Ridge Parkway authorities and Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s office.

There is no longer any club-sanctioned Tuesday night ride on the parkway, Berry wrote to members. Why? Because parkway authorities have hauled out an old regulation and are suddenly attempting to enforce it in a way that could quickly bankrupt the 175-member club.

This was spelled out in a February letter from parkway Superintendent Phil Francis to Goodlatte.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

Osvaldo Gago | Wikimedia Commons

Already, it’s brilliantly clear that Virginia’s grab-bag-of-taxes solution to a decade-long transportation funding crisis is unbelievably and needlessly complex.

The prime thing it seems to accomplish is that it gives Gov. Bob McDonnell bragging rights to say that he’s the first governor in the history of the nation who “abolished the gas tax” — the retail version, anyway. That may prove a useful resume-builder for his future in national politics

The plan replaces the retail gas tax with a wholesale tax that will certainly be passed onto consumers (and which is even higher for you diesel drivers, sorry!); raises the state sales tax, the vehicle transfer tax, and imposes local-option sales taxes for transportation, higher hotel taxes in Northern Virginia and some more fees and taxes.

The bill is 109 pages long, and they could have fixed the whole issue, mostly, by changing two digits in one line — 17.5  27.5 cents per gallon — and indexing the tax to inflation in the next sentence.

Now we have another question, raised in today’s Washington Post. Former Virginia Democratic Party Chairman Paul Goldman and Norman Leahy, editor of the right-leaning BearingDrift.com, ask: “Is it unconstitutional.” They seem to answer yes: Read more »

qJake | Wikimedia Commons

Note from Dan: Lots of people have been wondering why on Earth Gov. Bob McDonnell wants to kill the gas tax, but at the same time implement a new $100 a year tax on hybrids. I simply assumed some cynics in a Richmond conference room came up with this idea after one of them said, “How can we stick it to those environmentally conscious wackos who never vote for us?” But Bill Carstensen of Blacksburg has given it more thought.

By Bill Carstensen

I have been searching for a good reason that we hybrid owners should pay more to register our vehicles than others under the new “no gas tax” plan (gee, that sounds a lot like “no car tax” doesn’t it? That certainly went well for the state treasury).

Here is the plan’s logic as I see it:

Spread the cost of building and maintaining roads to all who spend money in the state through a sales tax increase and a removal of the state gas tax.  I can go for that, at least in principle, as we all benefit from roads whether we use them personally or not. Someone uses them to bring us most of what we own and what we eat. For added revenue, charge a bit more to everyone who registers a vehicle in Virginia.  I can also see that plan as we all should pay toward the roads we drive on through registration fees.

And, best of all, for more added revenue, charge a special rate of $100 per year to those who have made the decision to drive hybrid or electric vehicles (Virginia was 8th nationally in such registrations in 2009 so I am certainly not alone here).  So, let’s try to understand the economics of the last part of this decision. Read more »

Daryl Mitchell | Wikimedia Commons

This afternoon Gov. Bob McDonnell unveiled an eye-opening plan he said would solve Virginia’s transportation funding woes once and for all: He wants to abolish the 17.5 cents-per-gallon gasoline tax and replace it by raising the general sales tax from 5 percent to 5.8 percent.

Because I may be doing a column about that proposal soon, I’m interested in your thoughts about it.

McDonnell says this will raise more than $500 million each year for transportation infrastructure projects in Virginia, which have been sorely hamstrung in recent years. Of course, that’s because the legislature irresponsibly  hasn’t raised the gas tax since 1987.

From the governor’s email:

“That’s right, no more gas tax at the pump. No sales tax at the pump either. When this plan passes the price of gas will go down, and Virginians will spend $3.5 billion LESS at the pump over the next five years.

“We then propose increasing the sales tax from 5% to 5.8%, still below every neighboring state and the District of Columbia, and putting that increase into transportation from here forward. The advantage of that change? We’re ensuring that transportation receives the new funding it needs in the years ahead by tying it to a mechanism that moves in tandem with economic activity and inflation. That is how every other tax works. That is what will make transportation funding sustainable again. Read more »

Submitted by "Ron," shot by his son in Christiansburg

Just kidding about the headline, folks. It’s a jab at the RWers here who have so gleefully, loudly, viciously and unfairly blamed President Barack Obama for their rising fuel bills.

The president can do little to control the world oil markets, or refinery retools or temporary shutdowns, etc. etc. So we should not necessarily give him the credit.

But golly, at the rate gas prices are plummeting, who knows, they might be only $1.25 a gallon by Nov. 6 or so.

That date just happens to be Election Day.

The pic was sent in by the regular “Ron,” who notes that it was shot by his son in Christiansburg, and it reflects a 20-cent per gallon Kroger-shopper discount.

George "Papa Joe" ChrisTofis, standing with his trusty baseball bat outside the old Papa Joe's nightclub on Wise Avenue in Southeast Roanoke, long after it had been shut down by the feds. | Photo submitted by Maria Christofis

Roanoke will lose a piece of its history later this year.

It’s doubtful to raise the ire of any Roanoke Valley preservationists when a nondescript building along Wise Avenue in Southeast Roanoke (most recently the home of Vinton Roofing) is demolished to make room for the city’s first traffic circle.

However, in years past the two-story block, brick and stucco structure was one of the most newsworthy and notorious in Roanoke.

Back in the 1960s, it was Papa Joe’s, a beer joint reputed to be the first topless bar in the Bible Belt. Its fame — or perhaps infamy — stretched for hundreds of miles.

The proprietor was George “Papa Joe” Christofis, an Egyptian-born Greek who had a mind for business and an outrageous flair for publicity. On the side of his building, he painted in large letters, “The place that made Roanoke famous.”

That was not much of an exaggeration.

Papa’s Joe’s would go through as many as 18 kegs of beer on a weekend.

“He held the state record for draft beer,” Maria Christofis, the entrepreneur’s daughter, said of her dad.

At Papa Joe’s, the money came across the bar so fast there was no time to count it. Instead, bartenders raked it with their hands into peach baskets set on the floor and did the counting later.

READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.

Maria Christofis (left), Papa Joe's daughter, stands with Joy Payne, owner of Vinton Roofing, on the old feature dancer's stage in the Elbo Room at Papa Joe's old building. Payne recently sold the structure to VDOT, which plans to raze it to make way for a traffic circle.

The survey sent by Rep. Bob Goodlatte

Note from Dan: Joe Campbell of Glenvar was recently invited by Rep. Bob Goodlatte to fill out an online survey regarding energy. Campbell was less than pleased with design of the ‘survey,’ and in the letter that follows he let Goodlatte know that. The email that Goodlatte sent along with the survey is below the jump.

To Congressman Bob Goodlatte:

Sir,

I declined to fill out your on-line energy questionnaire because it doesn’t allow me either to rank the proposed policies numerically or even to express disapproval of some of the choices. Instead, it gives me only the Hobson’s choice of choosing one, or choosing all.

For example, I strongly oppose drilling in ANWAR, and I have devil-in-the-details reservations about offshore exploration and/or drilling.  I strongly support renewables and low-carbon-footprint energy. But the form is incapable of capturing my priorities, which was, I hope, the purpose of the form.  Worse, if interpreted as real data, you will form a simplistic, incorrect picture of your constituents’ opinions.

Now, a more cynical person would consider the structure of this form to be politically disingenuous.  I, however, would actually like to commend your efforts because I would like a simple, convenient medium through which to express my preferences– in a sensibly nuanced form.  Therefore, I’m giving you a do-over; namely, asking you to construct a form that allows me to choose not only those items of which I approve, but also those of which I disapprove.

Respectfully,

Joe Campbell
ROANOKE COUNTY Read more »