What’s with all the rail haters on this site? It isn’t that you all hate subsidies because I’ve never seen anyone on FR whine about highways that are 100% supported by taxpayers. When is an Interstate highway held to the ‘self suifficient’ standard that rail is held to? What about airports? Even airports are massively subsidized by tax payers and I’ve never seen anyone whine about them.
The reason that rail projects end up being government run is because when private enterprise tries to do it - like they did in Texas - then they have to deal with airlines like Southwest suing them into the dirt so the airline doesn’t lose passengers. Only government can afford to fight off people who make billions off of short flights and highway congestion.
I love choo choos. That doesn't change the fact that buses are a better way to deal with municipal traffic in most U.S. cities, and they can seldom compete with airlines for convenience and efficiency over greater distances.
Look at the infrastructure involved with choo choos compared to buses. If traffic patterns change a little, all a bus system has to do change the schedules. If traffic patterns change a lot, they have to install a few benches and maybe cut out a few stops. But choo choos? Crap, they have to tear up miles of roadway and lay new rails, install new infrastructure, screw up traffic for years.
Choo choos are really neat, but they are 19th century technology.
I'm not a rail hater, but if I want to go from say Austin to Dallas, and need to stop for business at small towns in between, the rail will most likely not have a station there. I have to rely on the rail schedule and stops.
Highway and airlines are about personal freedom
It's a simple as that
You are very wrong. Highways are not subsidized. Highway construction and maintenance comes directly from highway drivers by way of fuel taxes, generating a huge amount of money. So drivers are directly paying the costs to create & use highways.
No such thing for rail. Riders don't come close to the cost for paying for the construction and upkeep of rail systems.
In fact, much of the money used to subsidize rail comes from gasoline taxes paid for by car drivers.
That is why there is so much scorn for light passenger rail. It is a great idea to join high density areas together, but it is an idiotic idea everywhere else because the users getting the benefit pay a tiny fraction of the actual cost while people who never use the system pay most of the cost. Frankly, it would be cheaper to have a fleet of small buses drive people around for free, than to run trains virtually empty all day long.
When it comes to highways, their construction and upkeep is being directly paid for by drivers, especially commercial drivers who pay a large share of the fuel taxes (of course those big semis do massive damage to pavement as well, so that is fair).
As long as I am pointing out your errors, where to put Sacramento Light Rail wasn't a political decision. It was a short-sighted economic decision to place them on existing abandoned railroad right of way they could buy cheaply or get donated for quid pro quo. They hoped that running light rail along existing highway corridors, I-80, I-5 and highway 50, would get people out of their cars, which it hasn't. By the time you commute from your suburb to the highway, you don't want to park at a LRT station and wait 20 minutes for a train. The idiots should have placed the LRT lines away from existing highway corridors and then planned to build up the areas along the new LRT corridor, so people who like trains could live near them and never have to drive to the highway. This would also cut the driving time down for people who don't want to drive to work since they could live where they had local LRT stations, not have to drive to a highway to get to one. But then Sacramento planning has always been whored out to the highest developer anyway, so there was never a snowball's chance in hell that Sacramento would actually plan LRT correctly. They could have run station directly up through Rocklin, Loomis, Roseville and Elk Grove, etc. and allowed people to walk/short drive to the LRT stations, placing the highest density condos/apartments closest to the LRT stations. Idiots whored out, put the trains on cheap existing right of way, and then let developers fill in the land furthers from everything - rail and highway. Idiots.
Maybe because 99% of Americans actually use highways.