Willie Green Happy Choo-Choo thread.
Promoting 19th Century technology for the 21st Century.
Should be simple, make it economically feasible and they will ride.
But you can’t and they won’t.
“Passenger rail is one of those investments.”
A very very poor investment.
HELL NO!!!!
The future lies in more canals baby!
I’m thinking that mom didn’t buy you the train set you wanted when you were a little boy. Go buy yourself one.
“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!
If you can't deal with freedom maybe you can pimp for the Chinese.
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?
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
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
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.
Willie Green Happy Choo-Choo thread.
Promoting 19th Century technology for the 21st Century.
If it’s such a sure thing, why hasn’t some private company done it?
So the logic is if we're gonna flush this money down the toilet, by God, it should be a Wisconsin toilet!
The problem is not just in the flushing, but in the perpetual plumber bills that follow.
“According to the state Department of Transportation, one-way fares will be between $20 and $30 for the ride from Madison to Milwaukee. Compare that to the cost of driving. Using federal reimbursement rates for mileage, driving the 78 miles between Madison and Milwaukee costs $39. That means taking rail saves between $9 and $19 each trip.”
What sort of math is that? 78 miles is 2 or 3 gallons of gas and a tiny amount of wear. That’s 6 to 10 dollars, not $39. Federal reimbursement rates are not reality.
Is that 20 or 30 dollar fare the actual fare, or the subsidized fare?
I’ll ride your train when i can haul my freshly gutted deer home on it.