Posted on 08/13/2007 12:32:25 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
While the 35W Bridge was falling into disrepair, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent in Minneapolis building a useless light rail line out to the airport.
I like pretty trains as much as the next guy, but we have to get our priorities straight.
Trans-Texas Corridor PING!
Texas’ bridges are in pretty good shape, and don’t require as much maintenance.
This actually seems like a good idea, especially if it can be configured to run freight as well.
A bump in honor of Willie Green
Texas is pretty good when it comes to road and bridge maintenance, so that really isn’t my concern. The question is going to be if they can really overcome the right of way obstacles it ran into last time. Farmers were a large part of killing the last one since they didn’t want to drive a lot of miles out of the way to get to a crossing so they could transport crops and livestock.
Just exactly whose dream is this? Not mine....
The Trinity River power structure in Dallas is doing what it can to make sure that the interstate bridges over the Trinity are replaced with those fancy foreign designed ones.
We would have had efficient high speed rail service and local bus service everywhere in the US 40 years ago but for the evil Big 3 automakers and Big Oil.
“Well, sir, there’s nothing on earth
Like a genuine,
Bona fide,
Electrified,
Six-car
Monorail!”
— Lyle Lanley, Monorail Salesman to Springfield and Shelbyville
Yeah, I noticed that - but that’s for cosmetic reasons, not safety.
Of course, a lot of the power brokers’ support for “The Trinity Corridor” seems to have washed away with that HUGE flood of the Trinity a year or so ago.
Actually they are merely geting the alternate infrastructure ready so they can REALLY turn off the gas pumps forcing people to use alyternate transportation.
You forgot the envirowhackos. They would have blocked it.
Actually, there’s been a need for this sort of corridor in Texas since Amtrak’s decline in the 60s. There’s demand for more transport between DFW and other cities that needs to be filled. This would help, especially since the TTC is in trouble.
In Massachusetts the greenies have held up the expansion of commuter rail into the South Shore for 10 years with auto commuters having to put up with long commutes because a few crossings would ‘ruin the character of our towns’.
Isn’t that thing awful loud?
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
I hear those things are awfully loud...
Exactly what I was thinking of...
Count me in. We desperately need high speed intercity rail here in Texas. Gasoline is eventually going to become too expensive for use in private automobiles, and even if they build TTC-35, the Texas of 2020 will have double the number of drivers it has today. Air travel as we know it is already in trouble, and will probably disappear within the next decade or two due to security and profitability concerns.
At bullet-train speeds, downtown Houston is less than ninety minutes from downtown Dallas. Austin is equally close. San Antonio is two hours away; El Paso, four and one half (instead of nine hours by car or express bus). And that’s using 1960’s technology. If we had trains like the current TGV (c. 160 mph average speed), the in-development German ICE-3 (c. 220 mph) or the proposed Japanese Linear Chuo Shinkansen Maglev (>300 mph), intercity transit times would shrink even more profoundly. If rail commuting at 180 miles per hour were available, a person could conceivably live in Austin and commute to a job in Dallas, or vice versa, with a total commute time of <3 hours per day. I know people who already spend more time than this commuting by car every day.
What I can’t figure out is why the airlines would be behind the idea. What’s in it for them?
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