Posted on 12/19/2007 8:17:57 AM PST by Incorrigible
As I have recently moved to Chicago, and must say, I love taking the train into the city every day, as opposed to driving in. It’s METRA not AMTRAK, but they do use the same lines.
The alternative to direct subsidies would be to move the mail subsidy from airlines back to trains, and raise the air fares to make up the difference.
Congress is explicitly granted the ability to construct roads, specifically postal roads, but there certainly is nothing forbidding other road projects. I’d take much greater issue with the funding of La Raza, Planned Parenthood, etc.
$500M in OPERATING costs. This funding is for closer to $2B. So that’s 80 bucks per ticket.
The just passed funding bill is a 100% mockery of Constitutional principles and is illegal on it's face.
--Harry Nilsson
That particular route is run more like a gigantic public bus service or subway system than a railroad. The train stops at every railroad crossing along the way to let a few people board and pay a fractional fare. They usually ride just a few miles north or south... and then the train stops again to let them off. It is infuriating to passengers who bought full-fare tickets, but Amtrak could care less.
Milwaukee to Chicago Hiawatha service is absolutely wonderful. $42 roundtrip - I get a full days worth of work in even when running down for meetings or conventions. Oftentimes very full during the week. A great line.
Problem is the politicos want to bloat the area with their own interurban lines as well. Milwaukee to Kenosha, Milwaukee to Racine; lines that are almost redundant with Amtrak stops.
Same here. Two big factors killed the railroads post WW II: union featherbedding and the government subsidized emphasis on building highways and byways for the automobile. Prior to WW II the nation was blanketed by a web of inter-urban and intra-urban railway companies, many of them very profitable indeed. Anyone objecting in principle to government funding of the railroads needs to justify similar subsidies for airports and the whole airline system, hydroelectric dams and the power grid, the Interstate, a zillion projects of the Army Corps of Engineers, and myriad other infrastructures bought and paid for by the taxpayer and used by private enterprise to make a "profit."
....good point...sadly some major cities have covered over their heavy rail trackage by building roads, convention centers, basketball arenas and the like over the old abandoned lines....once you lose a rail right of way it’s hard to get it back.
ff
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