Posted on 05/09/2014 9:49:39 PM PDT by Cronos
AMERICA has by far the largest rail network in the world, with more than twice as much track as China. But it lags far behind other first-world countries in ridership. Instead of passengers, most of America's massive rail network is used to carry freight. Why don't Americans ride trains?
..the Japanese, the Swiss, the French, the Danes, the Russians, the Austrians, the Ukrainians, the Belarussians and the Belgians all accounted for more than 1,000 passenger-kilometres by rail in 2011; Americans accounted for 80. Amtrak carries 31m passengers per year. Mozambique's railways carried 108m passengers in 2011.
There are many reasons why Americans don't ride the rails as often as their European cousins. Most obviously, America is bigger than most European countries. Outside the northeast corridor, the central Texas megalopolis, California and the eastern Midwest, density is sometimes too low to support intercity train travel. Underinvestment, and a preference for shiny new visions over boring upgrades, has not helped. Most American passenger trains travel on tracks that are owned by freight companies. That means most trains have to defer to freight services, leading to lengthy delays that scare off passengers who want to arrive on time.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
Sure do. Another victim of the eventual governmental creep, although thankfully long after his passing. Even made enough money to electrify part of his railroad under his tenure, mostly through the Cascade Tunnel area.
I’m all for a free market in transportation, but I don’t have a time machine to go back and fix those things. Going forward bus intracity bus services don’t need to be government owned at all or ever. Few people realize that Rosa Parks was on a government bus.
Plus, it’s difficult to own a road in a city. Not impossible, but we’re talking about political reality. Most people didn’t and still don’t get basic economics and their instincts are correct in this case. You need some government. We’ve just got way too much of it.
I’ve been all over Europe and they don’t live like American middle-class people. Their homes are smaller, their cars are smaller and their pocketbooks seem smaller. Keep in mind that measures of wealth are misleading. It only takes a few very, very rich to skew those numbers on per capita income or wealth. I’m happy to entertain your statistics, but I’ll believe my eyes on this one.
They’re poorer via socialism. They’ve voted themselves somebody else’s money, but the joke’s on them.
Thanks, because it wasn’t obvious to me.
Do you think we could ever return to the Lochner Era or the Gilded Age? Men like Vanderbilt, Mellon, Rockefeller and Hill weren’t villains. They got rich because they satisfied a market need. Yet, our government schools teach a history that never was. People moved from farms to urban factories because their lives, working conditions and health improved. They weren’t forced. Can we break that myth and really return to a free market in America?
Things have gotten out of hand in some states. Ever took a look at how large New Jersey Transit’s bus network is, for example? It spans the whole state, literally; and they did that by eating up competing routes, both private and county owned/operated. The few holdout local private companies ended up being swallowed up by Coach USA, which is an international crony capitalist operation (part of the UK’s Stagecoach Group, along with the Coach Canada division).
No real benefit to all this state ownership either. Lots of bus routes were withdrawn, and fares continuously raised beyond the rate of inflation—which eliminates the benefit of cut-rate transfer tickets and even monthly passes.
And now they can't wait to make things even worse. I ride commuter trains to and from work (VRE in Virginia and MARC in Maryland). On the way home the other day there were 4 or 6 TSA rent-a-cops hanging around the platform at my Alexandria VA station yukking it up, doing nothing in particular.
Now, my wife and I, and everyone else at that station, are able to pull away from the station parking lot and leave. My fellow citizens and I have been doing this every GD day for the last who-knows-how-many years. Yet these TSA goons, maybe out of boredom, probably out of a desire to be the alpha-males, decided it was their duty to teach us stupid peons how to pull out of the parking lot. They actually took it upon themselves to get into the lot and direct traffic. The result? It took us twice as long to get out of there. F***ing morons...
Also, if sheer clutter and ability to fill a house with stuff qualifies as wealth, me and my relatives are among the superrich indeed. Unfortunately, that's far from the case.
I notice on television (if that's any indication) that some very rich people have some very nice things indeed, but don't have all the boxes of things they never use in their garages.
In Chicago if the CTA cuts a route it is illegal for a private company to fill that route. That’s nuts.
Sounds like the Chicago machine all right. Cut off their own noses to spite their faces.
“You must be one of them! “
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Not so,house long gone,but I walked my dogs for many years and wouldn’t allow them peeing on anyone’s property.
I trained my kids that way,and my grandkids are trained hat way.
It’s respect for someone else’s property.Seems simple to me.
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“The “near monopoly” never existed; that’s propaganda.”
That’s simply not so. American railroads enjoyed a monopoly on long distance travel for at least 50 years, from the Civil War until well after World War I.
There were very few paved roads outside of major cities in 1919 when Captain Dwight Eisenhower led a military convoy across the United States. This at a time when passenger trains were able to travel at over 100 mph between major American cities.
What existed were primitive auto-trails that began to be replaced by the US highway system only in the mid to late 1920s, with much of the construction being done during the Depression. Intercity bus lines then began to rival railroads for passenger traffic.
“Yes; federal regulations don’t make it affordable to build tracks to the current high-speed standards. “
Federal regulation has little to do with it. High speed roadbeds were economically rational when railroads had the passenger traffic to pay for them. With passenger traffic gone and likely never to return railroads are not going to invest huge sums on roadbed that freight traffic doesn’t require.
Federal regulation has everything to do with it. Railroads used to run at 100+ mph with absolute block signaling, which in these days is more labor-intensive. The Interstate Commerce Commission, and later the Federal Railroad Administration, started setting speed limits according to what kind of signaling was on the railroad, putting a major roadblock in the way of private enterprise being able to increase speeds of passenger trains with progression of technology. There are diesel trains that are capable of 150 mph and faster out there these days, but thanks to the regulatory burdens being put on passenger rail, nobody is ordering them.
BTW, one of the first major limited-access divided highways was built by a railroad. The Miller Elevated Highway (later called the West Side Highway) was built by the New York Central Railroad. The city didn’t maintain it after the Central was gone, and they shut it down in 1973 after a truck fell through due to a collapse of one segment; it was fully dismantled in 1989, and nothing replaced it.
The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 was the beginning of the federal government “competing” with railroads by building highways with taxpayer dollars. Guess who the president was. That act was followed by the Phipps Act of 1921. Never once was the private sector encouraged to engage in such road building; the feds controlled it every step of the way, especially by insisting that the roads not be tolled.
So what do you do about the squirrels, raccoons, skunks, deer and other animals that pee in your yard?
“So what do you do about the squirrels, raccoons, skunks, deer and other animals that pee in your yard?
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Aw,come on Sam,there is a difference between domesticated and wild. The leash law for the skunks in my town didn’t work out so well.
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So the pee is more pristine from wild animals than from domesticated animals? Just trying to understand here.
Finis,Sam,finis.
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Well, have at it. I can’t stand the habit or the perpetrators, so I avoid them both whenever possible.
I’d have to drive to the train station. If I’m driving, might as well go drive to my destination which is quicker than the train where I am not in control.
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