Posted on 04/14/2009 6:23:44 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration is expected to unveil its plans on Thursday for accelerating development of high-speed rail, a concept that in the past has had mixed political support and little public funding.
"It will be broad and strategic," Karen Rae, acting head of the Federal Railroad Administration, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday about the initiative described by officials as President Barack Obama's top transportation priority.
"It's going to talk about how we begin to create this new vision for high-speed and intercity rail," Rae said.
White House and transportation officials have spent the past several weeks weighing plans for developing at least six high-speed corridors.
High-speed rail initiatives are in various planning stages in California, Florida, Nevada, the Carolinas and the Northeast. States are already formulating how to use the large appropriation for high-speed rail projects in the economic stimulus act.
"Some of these plans are 20 years old," said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in an interview this week with Reuters Financial Television.
In February, Congress included $8 billion for rail development in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and Obama has included another $5 billion for the efforts in the White House's proposed budget.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
how many tens of billions will taxpayers subsidize this each year?
The ghost of WillieGreen is pleased.
Monorail, Monorail!!!! This will turn out like it did on the Simpsons; epic Fail!
How about drilling for oil?
How about more power transmission facilities (power grids for us smart folks - towers with wires that carry electricity for the Obamaloon crowd).
How about a guarantee that the new rail systems will be better than Amtrak? (As if any looongroup guarantee would be believable.)
Oh goodie, another guy who makes the trains run on time. Just what we need.
Will they name it Taggart Transcontinential?
sure! let’s invest billions (or Trillions) int a rail line that can be taken out of service with a few well place terrorist bombs.
And let’s keep buying oil from Islam murderers too
Why do’t we just cut our own heads off for them?
How many profitable rail lines are there in the U.S.? And now ‘da government’ thinks it would be wise to create more lines. Why not just take a hammer and hit yourself in the face with it lefties? It could help. All things being equal, if one thing doesn’t make sense to do and you do it anyway, who not something else?
Next they’ll be demanding auto makers stop making the larger safer profitable SUVs, and start making the smaller more dangerous unprofitable shoe-box size cars. Oh wait...
I am afraid to fly and that is the only reason why I would take a train or bus. 99% of people would rather fly or drive themselves in both short and long trips.
SPEND, SPEND,SPEND,SPEND....
This will be every bit as cost effective and well managed as the “Big Dig” in Boston.
I would love to see high-speed inter-city rail, but not from the government.
Hey, this is an investment for the future. I mean, just look at how successful Amtrak has been. A shining light in profitable public transportation.
Typical liberal double mindedness. They can brag about high speed rail without even mentioning Amtrak’s track record. And the MSM won’t ask about it either.
High speed rail is not efficient for short, drivable distances, nor for long, flyable distances. In between those two extremes, it’s great.
That won’t matter to the planners, however, since high speed rail will be treated like most light rail applications: feathers in the caps of politicians.
Coal powered trains.
The tens of billions of taxpayer subsidies will not be spent on building this imaginary high speed rail system, it will be spent subsidizing lawyers who will be hired to bring suits against companies that want to build this system.
Lawsuit after lawsuit will be filed for environmental and land acquisition reasons.
This would be a nice payback by the Marxist pig to his lawyer friends ... and he gets the freebee of sounding like he is doing something to the braindead in this country and the “media”.
Mass transit means you get to control AND RESTRICT the flow of the masses.
where people will go and which cities will die.
It also is about constrcution project corruption.
The slogan they ought to adopt:
Yesterday’s technology...today.
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