Posted on 09/05/2010 12:29:40 PM PDT by Willie Green
AUSTIN, TEXAS — Spanish trains whisk passengers from Madrid to Barcelona in little more than two and one-half hours. Japan has bullet trains. China is building a vast network of high-speed rail routes, including the recently opened line between Guangzhou and Wuhan, which covers 1,070 kilometers at the world’s fastest average speed.
Soon, perhaps, the United States, with the world’s largest economy will also clamber on board. So far, the United States — in spite of or perhaps because of its vast size — has virtually no fast trains capable of moving swiftly enough over a long distance to compete with airplanes.
That could change over the next decade. President Barack Obama has declared high-speed rail to be a priority. He is interested, he has said, in “innovations that change the way we travel in America” through the creation of cleaner, energy-saving options. The economic stimulus package provided $8 billion toward the development of high-speed rail. Another $2.3 billion in government awards should be announced this autumn, using money from the budget.
Soon, the U.S. government will publish its first-ever national rail plan, laying out a vision for the future of freight and passenger rail. It is supposed to be released by Sept. 15, but a spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration, Warren Flatau, said in an e-mail that Congress had recently requested an “additional level of specificity in the document,” and the agency is studying how to proceed to provide a thorough and timely report.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Private enterprise hasn’t done it yet because they don’t see it as profitable.
Government of course will do it because it’s more spending on something that will inevitably lose money every year.
You’re now reduced to quoting a New York Times article. That’s beyond sad. It’d be pitiable if it weren’t so downright evil.
I will ride a train when they pry my truck out of my cold dead hands!
It will of course be built by Big Brother with tax dollars confiscated from unwilling “donors.” The only winners will be labor unions, already drooling at the prospect of cost overruns, work delays and every other trick in the book.
put your trains in the dustbin of history with horses, carts, and stagecoaches.
They are stupid inefficient and don’t come from where people are and don’t go to where want to go and if people change their minds where the want to go you can’t move your tracks without cost like AIRPLANES can!!!!
Between the greenies' stranglehold on human activities, and the unions' stranglehold on the permanent escalation of costs vs. value, the status as a has-been for the U.S.A. makes this whole concept absurd.
In the 50s and 60s? Before egalitarian morons took over when the producers were busy creating, maybe.
Today ---- scary thought.
isn't the answer in there somewhere?
So would digging holes with shovels
So would digging holes with shovels
And, once the holes have been dug, even more people could be put back to work filling them in.
The NYT assumes high speed rail is desirable and then proceeds to propagandized based on that principle. The US is not Europe. For one thing it does not have the population density of Europe. Average trip lengths are much shorter in Europe. The NYT also assumes that government has unlimited resources with which to subsidize and distort ticket prices so as to create a favorable cost comparison with other modes of transportation. In fact, government should be prevented from even thinking of borrowing more money in our children’s name to finance any project that is not clearly economically “sustainable” on its own.
we’d be saving jobs by the millions
A whiny La Raza type liberal wrote an article two posts above this one complaining about the Great Wall of America
Put people to work building a real one, rather than a mostly imaginary one.
“China is building a vast network of high-speed rail routes”
****
What a great idea. Let’s get some cheap Chinese labor to build railroads for us...and some 19th Century railroad barons to use the disposable labor to build some transcontinental tracks for us. /sarc
Daily Willie Green Choo-Choo thread.
Promoting 19th Century technology for the 21st Century.
BTW I'm curious, do you have a fiduciary interest in this issue?
Europeans subsidize these trains with a 300% tax on gasoline. It would take ten dollar a gallon gas to pry Americans out of their cars and on to intercity trains. Not going to happen.
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