Quote:
Originally Posted by finnbow
To whom? Roads are already paid for by excise taxes on motor fuels. Trains, OTOH, are just a money pit for public subsidies.
One of the big problems with passenger rail in the US is the sprawling nature of our cities. If you live in a typical suburb of a big American city, you may well be an hour or more from the rail station and the rail station where you're headed may be an hour from your ultimate destination - and there may not be good public transport connecting the rail stations to anything else.
High speed rail in the US is a big, costly solution looking for a problem. If we want to spend money on rail, why not build world-class light rail/subways in our major cities? There are only a handful of big cities in this country that have light rail/subways that compete in terms of quality and coverage with major cities in other parts of the industrialized world. Even DC, with its Metro, doesn't yet have train service to its major gateway airport (Dulles). This is true of most major airports in the country.
We need to learn to walk before we run.
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I'll concede this point to you Finn. I could get behind light rail big time. I spent a lot of time in St. Louis a few years back. The Stl. light rail system starts at the airport. I was able to catch the train at the airport and take it to within a block of my client's downtown office. There are stops at the ballpark, at the tourist areas and all over the downtown area. It even goes across to Illinois. Kansas City's local dreamer kept petitioning to put light rail on the ballot, and it finally won, but for some reason it was never financed.
I have always thought that we missed a great opportunity in the 70's, when we had a gas crisis. (The price of gas got up close to $1.00
) Instead of focusing on improving mass transit in response, the oil companies were given incentive to drill baby drill. Cities continued to sprawl and we became more dependent on oil.
Regards,
D-Ray