All high speed rail lines lead to Chicago and corruption.
Posted on 10/14/2009 9:17:33 AM PDT by Willie Green
We’re in the season where private polls for candidates and parties are testing the pretext for candidacies. Will you be more or less likely to vote for a candidate with decades of experience in government? Would you find a political newcomer attractive? How appealing is a candidate with a military background? A woman? There are dozens of vocational, regional and demographic identities that fit most candidates, and we need to know which ones are most appealing to voters when we do a candidate rollout.
~~~SNIP~~~
There are two ripe opportunities these days for Republicans to go bipartisan without breaking the bank. By endorsing the continuation of the manned spaceflight program, Republicans can find common ground to work with Democrats. And by advocating for approval of federally funded high-speed rail in their states and regions, Republicans can finally join Democrats to say “YES!” to a federal initiative.
In the case of space, the cost is affordable and realistically represents maintenance of the budgetary status quo. And as the space advocates at www.savespace.us remind us, the space program is all about economic development, jobs and development of profitable new technologies.
~~~SNIP~~~
High-speed rail funding is part of the stimulus plan and is going to happen. The only remaining question is whether your state gets the dough or it goes elsewhere. Republicans in shovel-ready states like Florida and California, states advanced in high-speed rail planning, ought to be intertwined with their
Democratic colleagues, pushing in tandem for their states to get this money. Rail means jobs and development opportunities for Republican business owners and operators.
Space and rail are outstanding opportunities for Republican bipartisan action. They’re affordable. They are forward-looking. And they point America in new directions at a new pace — up and fast.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
GOP = Squish
Willie, Willie, Willie - rail pimping yet again. I guess you’ll be happy when the taxpayer subsidies for rail travel approach those for flights from remote airports.
My verbal repair, don't thank me. We don't lean on passenger rail in this country because, whereas Europe is a small place of relatively even terrain, America is a big place with highly eventful terrain. That's why air travel works best here. Idiots.
High-speed rail here would just be another Euro-emulating stupidity that would cost billions in the building and lose trillions in the running. Guys, there's a reason Europe is both broke and defenseless.
All high speed rail lines lead to Chicago and corruption.
“And by advocating for approval of federally funded high-speed rail in their states and regions, Republicans can finally join Democrats to say “YES!” to a federal initiative.”
And saying “NO” to conservatism.
Sad state of affairs. The question is not statism vs liberty, it’s just “how statist, and how fast?”
Whereas we're just broke.
Willie, Willie, Willie - rail pimping yet again. I guess you’ll be happy when the taxpayer subsidies for rail travel approach those for flights from remote airports.
Well we already know that the Multinational Oil Lobbyists are unconcerned about the plight of our domestic, local business. But GOP candidates aren't going to get elected unless they start adopting constructive positions on populist issues.
Seems to me that, rather than engaging in partisan obstructionism, we'll be much better off with honest, objective input to help assure that the money is spent wisely.
I'm actually quite pleased that David Hill recognizes this and offers our candidates some wise advice in this article.
It's costing the rest of us too much. Besides which, in Washington, D.C. the definition of "bipartisan" is "anyone who goes along with the Democrats without actually being one of them".
Ah, so the GOP should embrace pouring more money into wasteful public works projects as a mean to victory.
I would think you have been around long enough to realize that the GOP never wins when they try to out-Democrat the Democrats.
All high speed rail lines lead to Chicago and corruption.
Ah, so the GOP should embrace pouring more money into wasteful public works projects as a mean to victory."
It worked for IKE and the Interstate Highway System.
But that was half a century ago when Oil was cheap and plentiful.
It's time for the GOP to finally understand that Oil is going to gradually go the way of coal-fired locomotives.
We need to start developing transportation infrastructure that is not dependent on Oil for fuel.
It isn't going to happen overnight, but we can't wait until another crisis clubs us over the head.
Last I checked, after the Interstate Highway System was completed, the government did not have to subsidize people to drive their cars. That is the core problem with rail systems.
Anybody in my chunk of the world that votes for the rail boondoggle won’t get my vote. No using my money for a mode of transportation I won’t use and will get so little ridership I won’t even benefit from others using it.
Last I checked, after the Interstate Highway System was completed, the government did not have to subsidize people to drive their cars.
So what was the "Cash for Clunkers" program all about???
Heck, if the GOP had adopted high-speed rail and Maglev 10 years ago, we probably would have never had that stupid "Cash for Clunkers" program.
Nice leap from the 1950s to 2009, Willie. You are the one who raised Ike and the interstate highway system. Last I checked, Ike had been gone for decades when our current crop of idiots created Cash for Clunkers - and that was meant to spur sales, not subsidize daily driving.
“As a rule of thumb, Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislation that is partisan.” - Thomas Sowell
Nice leap from the 1950s to 2009, Willie.
Thanks! Just doing what I can to keep the discussion current and relevant.
Heck, it's not as if the past 8 years of globonomics was a huge success.
The Invisible Hand tossed the baby out with the bathwater,
And the GOP is left scratching its head, wondering why they suffered their worst defeat in living memory.
Juxtaposing events from 2009 and the 1950s is hardly keeping things relevant.
And the GOP is left scratching its head, wondering why they suffered their worst defeat in living memory.
The GOP got trounced because they abandoned their limited government principles. Your solution is to have them further such.
Since you say you are an engineer - if you are a civil engineer, please post which bridges you have worked on. I'll be sure to avoid driving over them, given your whacked-out reasoning you have shown here.
Whereas we're just broke.
My thinking exactly. We're not yet defenseless because we haven't been broke for as long.
Sowell is correct, as usual.
But the veneer of "bipartisanship" is one that Democrats love to use whenever a RINO or three join in supporting their schemes. Most recently, Obama couldn't wait to rush to the cameras and proclaim that the Baucus health care bill "enjoyed the support of members of both parties".
Er, better make that "member" in the case of the GOP, and even then it took an Olympian effort to provide the President with a cover of "bipartisanship" as thin as a lambskin.
It's relatively even terrain as long as you ignore Italy, Switzerland, a bunch of Germany, the Pyrenees, and most of the Balkans. Central France, central Spain, and the plains of Poland might be relatively flat, but it's hard to see the whole of Europe as 'relatively even.'
The argument needs to be about compactness of population, not flat terrain. Europe also expanded during the age of rail, and so in some ways grew to make best use of rails. It favors fewer and bigger cities.
The USA has grown up around the freedom of the car. We'd have to start going back to big cities and apartment living if we had to return to rails.
Since you say you are an engineer - if you are a civil engineer, please post which bridges you have worked on.
No, I'm not a civil engineer and I don't build bridges.
I'm an Industrial/Manufacturing Engineer (Work Smarter, Not Harder!)
One of the major responsibilities of my profession is to evaluate competing technologies for capital equipment acquisition. It can be a pretty complex analysis involving not only acquisition cost, but also operating costs, production capacity, inventory flow, quality, safety, energy & environmental factors, etc, etc. etc.
It can be pretty hectic because you don't always have access to the information that you need. But after doing it for 25~30 years or so, it gets pretty easy to come up with a rough estimate that gets you in the right ballpark.
That's part of what makes looking at these different mass transit projects so FUN. In many ways, the analysis is simply second nature. I just zero in on which one seems like the "best fit", depending how much information I have. LOL!
I think we're saying the same thing. Not too many trains in those Pyrenees, as I recall. It's a $%&*ing no-man's land. Darn few in the Italian Alps.
But you can't get to our West Coast without hitting the 15,000-foot Rockies. Northern California to South requires an elevation change of thousands of feet. And you have mile on mile of nothingness. The Delta coast is a rail nightmare that keeps getting washed out. There's no point in crossing the Adirondacks to get to Toronto, say, from NYC, unless you're a contractor getting paid by the stick of dynamite. And it's a ridiculously long, circular route to go by the Southern Tier.
The only route that's sufficiently populated and amenable to a roadbed is the Boston–Washington route. I love riding trains, and actually prefer them to planes, but the only strategy that makes sense is to de-regulate air, rail, and road, and let the market figure out what combination of transport works best. Otherwise, it will be a unionized, pork-infested boondoggle measured in stupidity per mile.
Absolute agreement on that.
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