Posted on 08/18/2009 8:05:01 AM PDT by mission9
The stimulus statists are at it again. This time they want to revive a rail project in Florida that was defeated by public referendum. The lure of stimulus dollars has brought the high-speed railers out in force to grease the skids to the next public boondoggle. Florida already has an Amtrak train in this corridor, yet the ridership is poor. So what is the government solution? Spend 8 billion of borrowed tax dollars on a high speed train that nobody will ride. Now that will fix the economy.
Will the tickets be cheaper? NO.
Will you get to your destination quicker? Only after you get to your rental car.
If the public will not ride a cheap AMTRAK train, albeit a little slower, why do the trainKooks think that the public will ride an expensive fast train?
Even if every person who currently rides aircraft to get from city to city were to switch, the revenue will still not be enough to pay for this project.
The typical argument is to induce Europe envy: “But they have high speed trains in Germany, ....blah, blah, blah...” If the transportation planning department craves speed, how about an AUTOBAHN? They have that in Europe too.
FREEP this site with gusto. Go to the “send us your thoughts” hyperlink, and give them a piece of your mind. Florida FREEPERS can look at the events calender, and FREEP the meetings.
Government has become a criminal conspiracy.
LOL! I really like that one. Don't tase me statist BUMP!
I couldn't have said it better BUMP!
I am so disgusted. I am thinking of going GALT.
Mass transit simply DOESN’T work in a Nation the size of the USA. ALL of Europe is smaller than the USA east of the Mississippi River!
OK... so you take a high-speed train from say... Atlanta to Washington DC (why anyone would want to go to THAT cesspool is beyond me, but...) in 2.5 hours. What do you do when you get there? Walk everywhere? Good luck with that! Expensive cabs? DC’s abysmal (and expensive) “public transit” system? HA!
I've been doing it for a couple of years in my own small way.
Florida News
I like that! We should make that into a bumper sticker:
You can have your light rail if you give me my autobahn.
I will run empty or lightly loaded just like our wonderful Tampa Ybor City to Channelside trolley boondoggle.
It will run ...
This is getting over the edge. I am going out of the country til November. If it does not get better I am going to mail in my disgust. What have we done? These useless idiots are in for a terrible surprise.
They are moving to North Carolina. Taxes here too high for property and insurance for storms.
ROFL Perfect comeback.
Joe Brower is the Florida pingmeister
“how about an AUTOBAHN? “
Yeah!
A few things here.
For the purposes of this discussion, mass transit is the movement of a large number of people in the same vehicle- a bus, train, airplane, etc. Some mass transit is rapid (airplane) while others are not (city bus).
What I call class 1 or level 1 mass transit is actually very efficient. This is the movement of people from one fixed location to another. Think of the ski lift that takes skiers from the bottom of the slope to the top. Or think of the monorail at Disney World: the parking lot to the park entrance.
Class 2 is the movement of people from a variety of locations to a fixed location. This is not nearly as efficient and takes some planning and coordination. An example would be school busses. Students all have to be prepositioned in the right place and at the right time for the system to work. In other words, the students must answer to the bus schedule.
Class 3 is the movement of people from a variety of locations to another variety of locations. This is what city bus systems attempt to accomplish. These systems only work in high density environments (such as New York’s subway).
The problem with high speed rail and airplanes is that while they may serve “a city”, they cannot serve every point in the city. We could build a Daytona-Orlando-Tampa express train, but little good will it do for the person trying to go from Deland to Clearwater.
Points well taken. Good Roads and the personal transportation vehicle are the hallmarks of our freedom and prosperity. Where ever good roads go, so goes, wealth.
Trains are elitist and undemocratic.
We have seen this movie before. It is no accident that the bad guys in the Westerns were the greedy train builders, who sought to end the freedom of the open range.
So it is today.
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