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| Re: Romney: ''I'd Get Rid Of Amtrak Subsidy'' (1144936) | |||
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Re: Romney: ''I'd Get Rid Of Amtrak Subsidy'' |
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Posted by WillD on Fri Mar 16 01:31:30 2012, in response to Re: Romney: ''I'd Get Rid Of Amtrak Subsidy'', posted by kp5308 on Thu Mar 15 10:05:39 2012. How 'bout reliable, say 80/100MPH passenger service?We tried that. In Ohio and Wisconsin, remember? Two ::ahem:: Republican governors just happened to kill it and then try to apply the funds from those projects to their highway departments. Oh no, gotta be high speed. Of course. Otherwise certain people of a political party which will remain nameless despite being the only one to have an explicitly anti-rail platform will attack it as being 'too slow' and 'not carrying people'. We're damned if we build high speed rail and we're damned if we wimp out and follow the Amtrak California/Cascades model. So far the big expensive projects have fared better than the cheap ones, so clearly something is working. . Anyway, Government will not "buck up & pay" even if they say they will. That mostly depends on the outcome of the next election. If the Republicans hold their congressional majority then it'll be 1992 again and we'll kick the high speed rail can another 20 years off into the future. If the Democrats win then it's not exactly certain that HSR will enjoy the widespread notoriety it had three years ago, but the chances are certainly much better for California's project to receive the funding it needs to provide a useful LA-SF service. Just look at the education/social services/broken whatever template being set up against the CAHSR project. And it ain't all Republicans Will. No, but it's the Republicans who always set it up as "my constituents need socialism, so you have to balance the budget and cannot have your earmark". Yea, networks that are already there & have suffered deferred maintenance for how long? Hardly. We pour ten times as much money into each mode as we would have under Obama's most generous high speed rail funding plan. The airlines are scrambling for their handouts to comply with the NextGen ATC system they demanded, all while crying that our system of airports will become the bottleneck which limits the utility of the new airway network. Every other idiot in an highway lobby office has some diagram of a second interstate highway system which they'd be only too happy to build for us if we'd just get those mass transit leeches out of their trust fund to build up some congestion and demand for new highways. One way or another we're going to have to spend a tremendous amount of money on our badly neglected transportation infrastructure, or we'll be forced to accept the cost that comes from having an undersized unreliable and thoroughly obsolete intercity transportation system. And you wish to add a whole 'nuther mode to maintain? Of course, because it's still a *hell* of a lot cheaper to move the rapidly growing mid distance intercity market between cities with HSR than it is to do so with air or road travel. You're talking a minimum cost of ten billion dollars to build a new airport these days, and that doesn't include ground transportation from the city center. Giving LA the two new airports (presumably Ontario and Palmdale), and San Fran another 1.5 to 2 (perhaps Castle and improvements to San Jose), would easily run 30 billion for the airports alone. You're then looking at the most expensive elements of the HSR system being required to make them truly useful to CBD travellers. By the time you tack on California's highway needs you've easily topped 70 billion dollars to get them back to a barely adequate transportation system. But with high speed rail you can spend LESS and get much more. |
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