Willie Green Happy Choo-Choo thread.
Promoting 19th Century technology for the 21st Century.
Posted on 09/25/2010 4:28:28 PM PDT by Willie Green
No argument from me. All public trans is nothing but a jobs program. Same as USPS, TSA, DOE, the list goes on and on.
If you are a communist I suppose the answer is yes.
A capitalist would always say NO.
Hey Willie could ya fill me in here:
Why waste $810 million when you already have a perfectly serviceable, fast, convenient interstate highway between the two cities?
Any hour of the day you can hop in your car and arrive in 90 minutes flat. You can even bring luggage and family members with you for no additional charge.
What’s not to like?
Narses...
I spent 9 years of my military career living in Europe. Rail works there and works well. There is a simple reason for it: there is less territory to cover. The entire country, from north to south, can be navigated by a train in a day. The population centers are nearby each other and the cities are relatively compressed.
Outside of the northeast corridor megalopolis (from DC to Boston), that is not the situation in this country.
Regardless of what propaganda your friend posts, it simply won’t work. Not because rail is bad. But because it’s not practical in this country because we are far too distributed.
The pertinent question to ask is if a rail supporter envisions re-organizing how we live so that we are all located in little clusters, grouped around the nearby rail station? (Like in Europe, where even farmers live in villages and leave the village every day to go tend to their fields or flocks). I think there would be a whole bunch of people who would resent something like that. But if we are to depend primarily upon public transport, that would be how we’d have to adjust our lives. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But if they want that, I’d suggest that they should just move to Europe, where that kind of lifestyle already exists (I understand that they could use some non-Muslim immigrants, too, by the way, to make up for their ever declining fertility rates).
Wow. This guy tells so many falsehoods and erects so many straw men, I don’t even know where to start.
It sounds very much like the “only pennies per day” crap that lame salesmen use to sell you something. Pennies add up over weeks, over months and over years. The flim-flammers hope you don’t bother to notice that.
Plus, just because states gouge the public on gasoline taxes is no valid reason to claim an increase to fund a riderless rail service is only going to make it go up a little bit by comparison.
If they LOWERED gas taxes as a part of funding rail, that might be interesting but, as usual, this is just another money grab by big government to drill deeper into our wallets and to claim it will only be “pennies a day” is not only insulting but spurious logic.
RAIL = FAIL
“In any case, the money can’t be spent on highways, and even if it was sent back to Washington, it would be reallocated to another state to build their rail system - leaving Wisconsin in the dust. (We also would be sending millions of our tax dollars to another state to build rail instead of us getting the hundreds of millions from other states.)”
Now there’s an impressive argument. It’s a boondoggle, but it’s OUR boondoggle, so let’s do it!
LOL, no let’s just do it again.
When will they get it?
Regardless of what propaganda your friend posts, it simply won’t work. Not because rail is bad. But because it’s not practical in this country because we are far too distributed.I agree.
I fled the “tax hell/job killing atmosphere” that is Wisconsin (to Houston) in May of this year and lived in Franklin a suburb just south and west of Mitchell Airport.
Rail transit will never work there...
The Greater Milwaukee area just isn’t dense enough to make mass transit work. Vast majority of potential “commuters” live in suburban sprawl and would have to drive several miles to “catch the train” - then be at the mercy of one of the least reliable bus systems I have ever known to actually get them to work.
Milwaukee doesn’t even have the taxi culture of Chicago - so no hailing cabs to solve the “last mile(s)” problem.
Without daily suburban commuters, it’s really just a toy for the occasional commute from Milwaukee to Madison. Do we need to spend hundreds of million dollars to subsidize a few thousand Milwaukee area Badger fans?
I got my first job out of college in New York City and took the train there...and within a month there was a train transit strike........
Liberals want to herd people onto mass transit to force their idea of “community” and collectivism on us........
and they want everybody in big cities and on mass transit......
it’s a shame that the Federal Reserve in 2000 and 2006 killed GREAT Republican economies because they believed the unemployment rate was too low......
because if the FED didn’t cause these two recessions.....the national debt would be paid off and taxes would be so low that Dems never would have a chance again to ruin an economy........
and the population would have kept moving out of the liberal states and into the conservative ones and taking electoral votes with them......
On the other hand, owning a car doesn’t turn a money profit, either.......same as mass transit
http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/popdensity.htm
Europe - 134 people per square mile
North America - 32 people per square mile
Wake me up when they can do that.
In Tucson there is always this push for light rail. It will cost "only" 500 Million. (And it will trash the main drag and cause havoc for all of the dozens of business along there for *only* five years. Ummm hmmmm.
Name me the last time any such estimate was less than HALF the actual cost.
It might help if the light rail advocates (politicians and their lobbyists who want into the slop trough) weren't such delusional liars. Name the realistic cost up front.
But if they did that, none would be built.
They might make sense if they provide fast travel from one ultra-dense population center to another. Break even, that's all I ask.
You are NOT a conservative. You’re an unapologetic Socialist.
“When will they get it?”
Never, it’s all about control. Same thing with eco causes, health care, public edu. It’s all about control.
Without daily suburban commuters, it’s really just a toy for the occasional commute from Milwaukee to Madison.
Milwaukee Intermodal Station provides service to over ½ million Amtrak passengers per year, and many thousands more use the facilities bus terminals. Providing a rail connection from that station to Madison will provide many passengers for the route without having to be reliant on the suburban population.
North America - 32 people per square mile
BINGO!!! (especially when you consider how uneven that population density is)
Willie Green Happy Choo-Choo thread.
Promoting 19th Century technology for the 21st Century.
Thanks, Willie - you confirmed my point exactly - this isn’t intended as anything but a subsidized toy for the “many” (code word for some depressingly low number).
By your own statement, that station only handles 500K Amtrak passengers a year. My guess nearly 80% of that traffic is Chicago-Milwaukee. Seriously, how many of those are really interested in going to Madison?
The Chicago METRA system alone handles over 82 MILLION passengers a year. Over 200 Million Chicago riders per year use the 3 main train system (L, Metra, & Amtrak).
This is way more than a build it, they will come issue. Milwaukee (and by extension the rest of SE Wisconsin) isn’t urban enough to support a successful rail system. The ridership will just never be there.
So, you push socialist crap and claim it’s ‘independent’. You’re the one who is out of place here, not me.
Well, excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse us . . .
Spain has a better quality of living than us. If you can find a job there, that is.
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