Daily Willie Green Choo-Choo thread.
Promoting 19th Century technology for the 21st Century.
Private enterprise hasn’t done it yet because they don’t see it as profitable.
Government of course will do it because it’s more spending on something that will inevitably lose money every year.
You’re now reduced to quoting a New York Times article. That’s beyond sad. It’d be pitiable if it weren’t so downright evil.
I will ride a train when they pry my truck out of my cold dead hands!
It will of course be built by Big Brother with tax dollars confiscated from unwilling “donors.” The only winners will be labor unions, already drooling at the prospect of cost overruns, work delays and every other trick in the book.
put your trains in the dustbin of history with horses, carts, and stagecoaches.
They are stupid inefficient and don’t come from where people are and don’t go to where want to go and if people change their minds where the want to go you can’t move your tracks without cost like AIRPLANES can!!!!
Between the greenies' stranglehold on human activities, and the unions' stranglehold on the permanent escalation of costs vs. value, the status as a has-been for the U.S.A. makes this whole concept absurd.
In the 50s and 60s? Before egalitarian morons took over when the producers were busy creating, maybe.
Today ---- scary thought.
isn't the answer in there somewhere?
The NYT assumes high speed rail is desirable and then proceeds to propagandized based on that principle. The US is not Europe. For one thing it does not have the population density of Europe. Average trip lengths are much shorter in Europe. The NYT also assumes that government has unlimited resources with which to subsidize and distort ticket prices so as to create a favorable cost comparison with other modes of transportation. In fact, government should be prevented from even thinking of borrowing more money in our children’s name to finance any project that is not clearly economically “sustainable” on its own.
“China is building a vast network of high-speed rail routes”
****
What a great idea. Let’s get some cheap Chinese labor to build railroads for us...and some 19th Century railroad barons to use the disposable labor to build some transcontinental tracks for us. /sarc
Daily Willie Green Choo-Choo thread.
Promoting 19th Century technology for the 21st Century.
BTW I'm curious, do you have a fiduciary interest in this issue?
Europeans subsidize these trains with a 300% tax on gasoline. It would take ten dollar a gallon gas to pry Americans out of their cars and on to intercity trains. Not going to happen.
we could use high speed freight trains to move goods around the US faster but high speed passenger rail doesn’t have bang for the buck.
How much private property will need to be seized by obamy in order for this to be built? How much private money will need to be seized by obamy in order for this to be built?
We'll all be better off if the Feds converts the money that would be spent into $100 bills and start a big bonfire on the Capital Mall.
It would be a spectacle. Bread and circus style. But the landscape would not be disrupted, and we would not be importing rolling stock from outside the US and when the fire burns out it's over. There's no maintenance costs, with USPO like service and costs to operate.
Sure trains whisk people around Europe at high speed. Take for example the Paris to Strasburg run. It's 120e per person each way, or 480e for two per round trip. We rented a car for the same trip for 100e, including fuel and way more versatile.
Now in Italy, with large population centers within 150 miles of each other the trains work well, but they are cheap.
Same logic applies here, large population centers within close proximity, cheap fares. Come up a proposal that includes all this, then we'll listen.
Boondoggle
How much will it cost, Willie? How many trillions of dollars do we have to spend? Give a number - something you have NEVER done.