Posted on 02/09/2011 5:24:19 AM PST by Kaslin
What good are passenger trains if they go through areas hundreds of miles away from where you live?
I live on the Front Range, and we have a govt-subsidized bus service between Denver and Colorado Springs that has very few customers, Someone calculated that it would be cheaper just to buy a car for each of the regular passengers than to continue the service.
A year ago the CS Gazette had an article about a Denver panhandler who bought a daily bus ticket to take him from liberal Denver to the very conservative town of Monument, because the conservatives in Monument were a lot more “liberal” with their cash that the liberals in Denver.
I agree. I lived in the city of Boston for 20 years, and I got around just fine on the subways -- they did shut down before midnight, and that was often inconvenient, but subways were fine for travel inside the city.
Then I moved out to the suburbs. There was a real train station in my town, and I did commute into Boston via train for a few years, but it was awful. If I worked a few minutes late, I would miss my usual train and have to wait 2 hours to catch the next one. If I had a meeting 30 minutes before my usual start time, I would have to show up 2 hours early. The train schedule ruled my life. No thanks!
When will liberals learn that many of us don’t ever want to be in close proximity to their constituents.
I have always despised public transportation, the transportation is fine, it’s the public that’s the problem!
Part of this is post-Davos claptrap. The big Euro and Japanese train making companies exerting influence on a very gullible social group — the super rich.
Also, keep in mind terrorist can’t put bombs on a “cloud”,
but they would have all that track to leave their handy work on.
Supposedly by the so-called highway trust fund funded by fuel taxes. IE. That means the people who use them are the ones who pay for them. This is NOT the case for trains. People who never set foot on one are being forced to pay for them.
So I don’t see why it’s worse for this to be the case with trains
If you don't see the difference between using tax dollars for something that's used by 95% of the population and paid for by those who use it contrasted with something that is used by 1/100th of a percent of the population yet paid for by those who don't use it, then I don't think anything anyone says here will enlighten you.
People can use trains for distance travel (and rent a car when they get where they are going, just as air travellers do)
Wrong. Last time I looked there were no car rental agencies or significant parking at train stations. To compare trains to air travel is especially dishonest since you can usually go by car faster than you can by train. Particularly when you factor in all of the stops that trains make for no apparent reason. So let me see.
While I think a true self-supporting train system might work the way you envision, I’m just not sure it is feasible in the US.
I remember being quite impressed with the public transport systems in Europe. You could take a bus from your home to the train station, ride the train, then take another bus to your destination. The busses and trains always seemed to be well filled (if not outright packed). But then, in France and England, where I had those experiences, there are no vast regions of little or no population such as we have in the US. Every mile of track costs a certain amount to maintain; while it may be cost effective to run a train between major towns/cities that are maybe 50 miles apart, when the towns/cities are hundreds of miles apart, the cost rises significantly.
lol
True. And think of how massive a wreck that a train moving 80 mph would have if the track is blown, and very easily done so at that.
Can you imagine the mess, if all the people who currently drive, suddenly had to start taking a train to commute or travel?
For one, there is no way that the rail/train system could handle the load. There would be waiting lines and lists spanning weeks, even months ahead.
Trains are fine if you are a Policy Wonk going from Point A to Point B. But yesterday I had to go from Point A to Point B to Point C to point D and back to Point A. Point C was a Food Bank and if I had taken the train yesterday I would not have been able to take the food on the train and if even I had, it would have defrosted. And then there’s golf before work in the Summer.
It took three hours to go to a place that would’ve taken 30 minutes by car. The other riders were obnoxious and possibly criminals looking for a crime.
The bus station was a cross between something from Mad Max, Escape from New York, and a documentary about crime in Detroit (we’re not in not that city, but you get the idea). It was going to be a 50 minute wait at the bus station for the next inefficient bus, so we decided to walk to remaining 3 miles home.
Riding the train in another city was only a little better.
Maybe things were better 60 years ago when people acted more like humans rather than the animals that public schools tell them they are.
I’ll keep my car thank you.
Yes and do you remember hearing him in his speech, saying something about and we wouldn’t have to be patted down and then he laughed? Which made no sense at all...what an idiot!!
I take that makes no sense at all back...
We wouldn’t need to be patted down because the bombers would be on the track not on the train. How silly of me.
the stroke of an indelible pencil.
Oh sure, wipe out the eraser industry in a single stroke.
Unintended consequences...empty factories, rubber trees
untended, guys beside the highway with signs,
“Will erase for food!”.
It’s in the nature of the beast, or liberal, to believe that government can solve any problem...even when it doesn’t exist. In theory, high speed rail sounds like a great idea. But what if it’s not needed? Never mind say the liberals, full steam ahead with these light rail lines that will waste billions of tax dollars and few will use.
They’ve brought the commuter rail to Austin, TX this year. Ha, what a freakin’ joke. No one wanted it but Gov. Perry forced it on us. It rides along side the highway so you can see inside the cars... make that the very empty cars. Perry also brought us the toll road last year. Personally, I can’t see it’s helped anything. Some like it but there’s no where I need to go that I can’t skirt around it with equal drive time and save my $$$.
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