I think it’s more correct to say that no other country is stupid enough to spend $400 billion on a fighter jet. If you build a road bridge or a mass transit system or a highway system, those things add to the economy in a way that a fighter jet or an aircraft carrier do not. It’s unfortunate that the only big spending that seems to get approved in this country is fantastically expensive military projects.
I am in agreement. However, wouldn’t the $400B spent on the fighter plane project have gone into the pockets of the people working on the project, and thus into their local economies? Granted, it’s not the same way as a bridge or transit system, which benefit the masses. But it’s not like the $400B was taken out of the economy altogether, is it? Genuine question.
I’m not an economist, so I may well be an idiot but what I said is how I understand it. I’ll try an analogy. Say you live on two acres in suburban Connecticut and you’re proud of your lawn and garden. But your neighbor has a dog that repeatedly uses your lawn as its toilet. You consider spending $20,000 on a defensive device that will shoot the dog harmlessly but painfully every time it wanders over. (You like your lawn, but you’re not a monster, so you rejected the option for a system that would kill the dog.) Or instead, you could spend the $20,000 on solar panels for your roof, or improved insulation and energy-efficient windows. Both options put $20,000 in the local economy but the second one pays dividends in the form of reduced energy expenditures.
Yes, that makes sense. It’s about the ‘utility’ of the investment.
That’s a bit of an oversimplification, though. Sure, a bridge has more day-to-day utility than a fighter plane. But you can’t sell a bridge, or at least not while you’re using it. You can, however, sell fighter planes. We’re still selling variants of the F-15 (developed in the '50s and '60s) and F-16/F-18 (developed in the '60s and '70s) to foreign buyers (and still buying some ourselves) 50+ years after the major investments in airframe development were made. It’s reasonable to expect that we’ll still be selling F-35s in 50 years. I suspect the F-16 has more than paid for the cost of its own development in foreign sales over the years, though admittedly it’s one of the most successful defense projects in terms of exports of all time.
To quote/paraphrase a friend who just returned from China, and who observed plans to move an entire major university campus 40 miles away in a year, something impossible in the USA, “When China decides to do something, they just do it, and nothing stands in their way.”
And what about “UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Japan… Korea, and Taiwan,” to quote the OP’s list of countries which aren’t China but have high-speed rail (in fact, have mostly had it since long before China considered it)?
I know that Japan, for example, doesnt have to worry about every city and county along the line suing them. Once the feds make up their mind (with local input, to be sure)* they do it. *They pay fair prices but dont allow every landowner to tie the line up in courts for a decade.
The issue here in America- is perhaps* too much democracy.* At least for these sorts of projects.
what about them? Why do you want me to spend a shit ton of my tax money on a transportation node that is half the speed of an airline and anchored on a route that limits my needs to actually get anywhere?
I’m serious. for what reason?
I LOVE trains. I will often made a day of driving around parts of my state to watch them. But it doesn’t serve me to ride one to anywhere for any distance, The fastest trains on the planet are half the speed of an airliner. I would take a train for the fun of it. My bucket list has a trip out West or in Canada where I can sit back and watch the world go by. but it won’t be to get anywhere in a timely manner. that’s what jets are for.
So I ask you, what possible reason can you give me to justify an expensive slow moving node of transport that has limited points of connection?
Perhaps the choice of building the F-35 was stupid, or at least not the wisest choice. That isn’t my point. My point is that the US has demonstrated the ability to build complex and difficult things. We don’t build railroads. We do build space telescopes or advanced jet aircraft. The individual pieces are a lot smaller, but the effort and advances that go into the LIGO leave any technology that went into country X’s bullet train in the last century. Size isn’t the only measure of advancement-I am arguing that it isn’t even a good measure.
And as for the investment potential of the F-35, well I point out that one of the increasingly few business areas where the US is still the unquestioned leader is aerospace. Building a new fighter is one of the few ways you can get the votes in congress to invest in an area where we are the leader. Personally I would have preferred something different-say nuclear energy, but at least an investment was made that keeps the US in the forefront.
I am guessing you didn’t actually read the post I was responding to. I didn’t say anything about the merits of high speed rail.
Having said that, high speed rail will benefit you whether or not you actually use it. Every person taking a train is one less car on the road or one less air passenger. That means less traffic and less public investment on road maintenance, and shorter waits at airports. Note also that in many cities cannot expand any further due to lack of available runway space, and that expanding highways is prohibitively expensive due to the land values in high-traffic areas. Every person commuting into a major city by rail is an extra parking space for someone else in the business district(s).
In short, you should spend “a ton of your tax money” on rail because it will be good for you.
This has been addressed several times in the thread. If you want to go from one end of the country to the other, a train is not a good choice. But if you want to go from, say, Cleveland to Cincinnati, a high speed train is certain to get you there quicker than a plane (after you factor in the time spent boarding, shuffling through check-in/security, and so on).
I disagree it would be good for me even if I don’t use it. There are still roads and bridges that need repair. this takes money away from the state budget that could go toward these repairs.
It’s also been addressed several times that it’s not cost effective. As for security, a high speed train is far more vulnerable to terrorists attacking it at ground level.
And we’ve already discussed a Cincinnati to Cleveland train. We didn’t want it. Pie in the sky waste of money. You can drive down the interstate in Cincinnat and still see the last high speed train debacle. They were building an interurban from the center of town heading north. the tunnels openings are still there.
I really and truly don’t understand the disconnect here. Unless there is an existing demographic connection to train travel there isn’t the infrastructure to support ridership. We abandoned that infrastructure a half century ago in favor of decentralized one served by cars, buses, and planes.
One decade? Pffff fucking amateurs.
Some farmers are still refusing to sell their land to the airport 40 years after the airport opened.
Japan has many infrastructure projects which have been halted because some landowner refuses to sell. There are bridges which are built but then not able to connect to the road built close to it.
I didn’t say anything about security, except that it delays your plane journey(s). But there’s nothing about high speed rail travel that makes it less secure than (say) an interstate. If a terrorist just wants to kill people, blowing up a highway bridge is no more difficult and no less effective than blowing up some rails.
We didn’t abandon rail infrastructure. It was taken from us.
Oh please. Nobody held a gun to anybody’s head. GM sold a transportation system that could travel FROM anywhere TO anywhere and was cheaper to operate. If there was any money in HSR they would have added it to their train production.
As someone who has used Japan’s bullet trains countless times over 36 years, I have a hard time seeing how it would be feasible in very many places in the States.
As a sales and marketing manager for Japan for a couple of decades, I traveled extensively.
The US has greatly subsidized automobile travel in the States. In Japan, the express road tolls between Tokyo and Osaka (about 500 km) is almost that same cost as the bullet train. Gas is more expensive as well. It would take having several passengers to make driving cheaper than trains.
The destination cities have better public transportation so taking the train isn’t as much of an inconvenience. As there are well developed public transportation systems, businesses generally cluster around the train stations.
With subsidized roads and cheaper gas, and poor pubic transportation systems outside of a few areas, I don’t see the US wanting to spend the money required to make it work. It may be possible that as car sharing becomes a feasible alternative, then it may make sense then, but it doesn’t seen to now.
Texas Central, the company behind the Dallas - Houston high speed rail project laid off most of their employees.
Why is the very concept of passenger rail so beloved, to the point that people keep proposing its renovation time and again? If you go back to the heyday of freeway building (late 1930s through early 1960s), people at the time thought freeways and private cars were the wave of the future and were glad about it. Illustrations from the time such as in “Popular Mechanics” depicted a shining future of people in their luxurious land-yacht cars criss-crossing the country. And at this time passenger rail had a near-monopoly on long-distance travel (before jets made air travel more competitive), so presumably people found rail unpleasant or inconvenient enough to wish for an alternative.
It’s a good question. I would speculate that since it works well in some applications (inner city, inter-city, between two city centers that are too close to serve via air), people assume it will work well everywhere. There is also that whole nostalgia thing. The same can be said for revitalizing downtowns, building sports arenas, etc. It just seems like a good idea, that no amount of facts will dissuade.
Well, passenger rail seems to work fine in Europe and Asia (China, Japan and India).