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| Re: Biden: $2.45B loan for Amtrak upgrades in Northeast Corridor (1406766) | |||
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Re: Biden: $2.45B loan for Amtrak upgrades in Northeast Corridor |
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Posted by Henry R32 #3730 on Mon Aug 29 16:23:54 2016, in response to Re: Biden: $2.45B loan for Amtrak upgrades in Northeast Corridor, posted by brightonr68 on Mon Aug 29 16:06:32 2016. Albany-NYC already has the customers. They're just:1. On Megabus and Chinatown buses, to a lesser extent Greyhound 2. Selling out the existing trains at record rates (ALB is the 9th busiest station in the US). 3. Driving to park and rides in Metro North territory or Ramsey Rt 17. The thing is with higher speed trains it actually costs less to run the service. If you can get a train to Albany from NYC in 1.5 hours instead of 2.5 hours, you can run hourly service with four trainsets / crews. Operating costs actually go *down*. If they kept fares at the current rate but beefed up the speed, all of those other modes would lose favor, and they would make money in volume. And it will definitely be viable in the US once air travel becomes prohibitively expensive. While ground transportation can play around to become more energy efficient and shift the method of power generation, airlines are at the mercy of burning kerosene. Batteries add too much weight. So unless we go to helium airships, high speed intercity travel will *need* to be on the ground in the future. Of course as a society we've gotten far more short sighted, and no one will start this until it's too late... |
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