Posted on 06/17/2021 2:20:44 AM PDT by Libloather
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) on Wednesday called on Congress to increase funding for high-speed rail in the infrastructure package.
President Biden's $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal invests $80 billion in rail projects, but industry experts say that money will mostly be spent on updating existing Amtrak lines rather than building new high-speed railways. Biden's plan includes far more funding for roads, bridges and electric cars than public transit.
"Rail is climate infrastructure," Ocasio-Cortez said at a press conference Wednesday. "For every buck that we're going to put into a car and a bridge, we want to put a buck into a rail. We want equity. That's what we're here to demand."
The lawmakers launched a high-speed rail coalition that includes the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the U.S. High Speed Rail Association. They say an electrically powered high-speed rail network would create millions of new jobs and drastically reduce the nation's carbon footprint.
While large sections of Europe and Asia are served by high-speed rail lines, the U.S. currently doesn't deploy any trains considered "high speed."
"We're the strongest, greatest economy in the world when it comes to entrepreneurialism and when it comes to innovation, and we should never be ceding that leadership anywhere in the world," Gillibrand said at the press conference Wednesday.
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee last week advanced a $547 billion transportation bill that dedicates $25 billion toward high-speed rail projects. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said she wants to bring the transportation bill to the House floor before July 4.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Only if every piece of steel is manufactured by using wind and solar energy. Let's see the bartender pull that rabbit out of her hat.
When do I book my train to Hawaii?
COVID train to Wuhan?
The only place in America where this idea might have value is the DC to NY City run. Beyond that....no one from SF really cares to have a run to Vegas....same story for folks in Miami having an interest in a run to Orlando. Chicago to St Louis? Why? Dallas to Houston? Worthless.
Exactly.
Who in their right mind would want to take a train from one ‘Rat controlled Urban Utopia to another?
What is this infatuation with rail transportation? When originally conceived in the early 19th Century, it was a quicker and more efficient method of transportation than horseback or mule team transport, but technological progress has far outpaced those first primitive attempts to accelerate human communications and physical movement. In a highly urbanized environment, light rail may make some sense, to move people through highly congested corridors, but for much of the country, a fine, wide, hard-surfaced roadway network with individually controlled vehicles is far more efficient use of resources and time than rail transport over long distances.
That is what aircraft are for. Or suborbital launches that skirt the lower edges of outer space.
And as for that train to Hawaii - the Chinese have proposed a deep tunnel extending below the ocean floor for intercontinental travel. The engineering problems would be horrendous.
Not to mention the expense.
That’s absolutely true, back when Obama had his stimulus package, he was to give to Florida 2 billion to build high speed rail from Tampa to Orlando, Rick Scott was Governor and turned it down saying it would never work, the cost overruns would be enormous and the State would be on the hook for ongoing costs of operating it....
High Speed Rail outside 1-2 places will never work, cost enormous amounts of money and not enough people will ride it to justify the costs....
The money would be far better spent on upgrading highways, airports, and other physical infrastructure..
I asked her what would she do when she gets off the train in Orlando? How would she get to her office in Kissimmee every day? Of course she looked away and had no answer.
One of several reasons why relatively few people would take such a train.
Paging Willie Green, Paging Willie Green!
Isn’t building all that track going to cause CO2?
The only place where HSR will be successful will be the Northeast Corridor between DC and Boston. However, HSR will kill Connecticut’s Marine Industry since you’ll have to keep drawbridges closed if you rebuild the New Haven Route. If they build a new corridor, it will transform some old Connecticut’s small towns. Also a new corridor will be an albatross to American taxpayers...
Who uses high speed rail, besides liberals?
Let’s use all this money they are proposing to spend for the different(often useless)projects & instead use it somehow to weed out the morons in our Congress. Then we might be able to save some money afterwards instead of going deeper into a debt we can most likely never repay. I’m just an average retired person with no college education & I can understand what a mess this country is in....why can’t our elected “representatives”? Actually, they are representatives. It’s just that they represent everyone except the people they are supposed to represent.
As with the train to Alaska it will have to be solar or wind powered.
But who would use it now that "downtown" means an un-policed hellhole of crime?
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