Yes, but those countries have a certain desire to progress and are willing to sacrifice for a better future–even if it may take years to get there.
Here, OTOH, “if it was good enough for my father and his father before him, then it’s good enough for me.” Even if it’s slow, wasteful, dangerous and environmentally destructive.
It’s hard to move forward when the knuckle-dragging slows you down so much.
This visceral hatred of trains and selfishly paranoid worldview of “You can have my SUV when you pry it from my cold, dead hands” is very unbecoming of us. The irony is, if this was the 1950’s, the same backwardists bitching in this thread about rail travel would be bitching about the same Federal Interstate Highway system that now makes them jizz all over the leather seats of their pickup trucks. “What if the traffic patterns change?!?!?!” “You can’t just move that highway to another city if this city goes belly-up, you know!!!”
It’s a shame–we still have a long way to go to catch up to the more civilized nations–and in many more areas then just rail travel.
Perfect. Another hilarious reminder of how the backwardists trap themselves with their own “logic”. Reminds me of another line from the Board that had the doom-and-gloomers fuming because it so perfectly exposed the absurdity of their views on Universal Health Care that they were left uttering mere gibberish:
“Universal Health Care-- A great idea in practice, but it’ll never work in theory.”*
I think it was Brain Glutton who came up with that truthgem.
How convenient each option is is one of the considerations that goes into deciding which one is better than the other. If driving to work was more convenient for you, and that was enough to make you choose driving over the Metro, then that’s another way of saying that the Metro was not, in fact, better for you.
Now, of course, everyone has a slightly different figure of merit, so in practice what you’ll get is some people deciding that the train is the best option for them, some people deciding that the plane is the best option, some people choosing to drive, and some people hopping from NYC to DC on a pogo stick. But if we can, say, put in a train between two cities that’s both slightly faster (counting time getting to the terminus and time spent waiting there) and slightly cheaper than taking the plane between those two cities, then what you’re going to find is that at least half of the people who would otherwise have flown will be taking the train instead. That seems pretty significant, to me.
Very convenient, yes. ‘Better’ of course is all a matter of perspective.
Very significant…especially when you consider the large costs (ETA: I originally said 10’s or 100’s of billions, but on reflection I’m actually unsure what such a system would cost DC to NYC) you just spent to simply give people another option to get from DC to NYC. I suppose if you feel it’s worth all the cost and effort to do so then that’s fine. Myself, if my feeling is that if it simply a matter of giving folks a 4th option (car, plane, current low speed train and now high speed train) then it’s not worth the cost, and will simply be another high cost boondoggle that will need heavy subsidies in order to keep it viable…and perhaps require more subsidies to the air lines who maintain the air routes, since there will still be folks who want to use those.
I don’t think the Detroit reference made by Sam Stone in his first post is valid. There are a few obscure Amtrack stops from Flint to Chicago. Its not the stop, its the route that counts. You could make a high speed rail line from Chicago to Montreal with stops in Flint, Port Huron, Niagra, Toronto, with few or many in between and the system could still be profitable.
I think so too. At 200+ MPH someone in Seattle could get down to San Francisco in a couple of hours? I can see people taking weekend trips down the coast if we can keep the cost reasonable.
I don’t know where you are getting your figures from, but the subsidy is far, far greater than $100 million. There are also other “subsidies” like the following:
I was talking about direct airport operations subsidies. The 30 billion you mentioned above appears to be the entire DOT spending on air travel. That includes maintenance of the air traffic control system, safety programs, and some upgrade programs for airports - for example to provide new runway lighting.
I guess it all depends on what you want to consider a subsidy. You can see the entire list here: [url=http://www.dot.gov/bib2009/htm/FAA.html]FAA budget in brief, 2009). The budget for 2009 is 14 billion and change, the vast majority of which goes to maintaining ATC and various safety programs.
The rail administration budget is about 1.1 billion. The Federal Transit Administration has a budget of a little more than 10 billion, a significant portion fo which goes to subsidizing rail (for example, 271 million this year for the Long Island Railroad).
I’m pretty sure one of the reasons that California voters approved the high speed rail system they are currently working on is because the cost of acquiring land to expand the airports in SoCal in order to meet projected demand was astronomical.
The claim was NOT false. The cite I posted was direct from ICAO. That’s about as authoritative as it gets.
The ‘subsidies’ airports get are mostly the federal maintenance of the Air Traffic Control system. That’s not a subsidy to local airports, it’s the cost of maintenance of the entire system. And it’s mostly not even a subsidy, because most of the FAA’s budget is paid for from the Aviation Trust Fund. The trust fund gets money from excise taxes (ticket taxes, fuel taxes, etc). The FAA then draws from the trust fund to pay for programs such as upgrading weather radars, paying for Air Traffic Control, etc.
For example, in 2007 the Aviation Trust Fund took in about 12 billion dollars in income from taxes. Out of that, 5.5 billion went to pay for ATC, 3.7 billion went to airports, another 2.8 billion went to facilities and equipment (weather stations, safety equipment, etc). This is not a ‘subsidy’. Or to be more clear, it’s a subsidy to some airports and a tax on others. It’s more like social welfare for aviation - everyone pays in, and then the FAA doles it out based on need. That’s why there’s the direct subsidy to smaller airports that I mentioned above. The system as a whole is largely self-funding, and in that system, the majority of airports run at a profit.
The same was true of that 30 billion dollars a year for highways that brickbacon mentioned. That’s the budget for highway administration, but what you don’t see is that most of that budget is paid for by various road travel related taxes.
You could at least try reading the cites I linked to before making comments like that.
The other flavor of subsidy airports get which isn’t mentioned in the FAA statistics come from things like local tax breaks for airport land or land grants for expansion and that sort of thing. It’s more in some places, less in others, non-existant in some. But there’s an argument for why they aren’t necessarily a subsidy, because having an airport can bring large positive externalities to a community. It can make companies more profitable, provide emergency medevac for patients who need to go elsewhere, give the city a competitive advantage when enticing business to relocate there, improve tourism, etc. And by the way, rail has exactly the same kinds of ‘off-book’ subsidies that don’t show up in federal budgets for rail operations.