driftdiver wrote (to Willie the resident Green):
Should be simple, make it economically feasible and they will ride.
But you can’t and they won’t.
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).