For the first question, it’s simple economics. It’s not a better option, because private enterprise would already have done it.
The second part is more complicated. The obvious answer is yes, because “some” means “not all.” But it still has to be enough people that it makes sense economically, which is what “competitive” means.
I’m fine with that but I would prefer they work out the debt directly with China and keep our grandchildren out of the loop.
This whole “free money needs a good home” mindset of Congress is nothing short of fiduciary malfeasance. Ohio can’t afford the seed money for the rail system let alone operate it when built and no other state is in a position to loan us the money. If my state can’t afford it and other states don’t have the excess money to loan out who is going to pay for it?
That’s not a fair comparison - the NYC subway fare was fixed by law at 5 cents, and remained at 5 cents from when the subway opened in 1904 through 1948. Adjust that for inflation, and the fare fell to an effective 2 cents in 1920 and again by 1948. It got to the point that the 5 cent fare didn’t even cover the interest on the loans the Interborough had taken out.
More discussion of this is likely off-topic for this thread, but feel free to open a new one if you’re interested.
Because they, the ®, can keep pork barrelling the transportation industry with fascist payoffs and understandings… best to keep America isolated and locked in middleground of political and geographical isolation. Innovation is evil, progression is wrong.
I don’t think that is accurate. Do you have a cite for it?
Here in Minnesota, fuel taxes pay only about 1/3 of the cost, the rest comes out of the general fund. Including maintainence of the Interstates (even when Pawlenty skimps on maintaining them, and lets a bridge fall into the Mississippi River). Even if it was intended to be revenue-neutral, that is no longer followed – fuel taxes haven’t been raised for years, well below inflation.
Bull!
I pay property taxes to maintain our airport. Not even considering the fact that the airport doesn’t pay any taxes itself. And they didn’t even pay for the land in the first place.
Oh, I see what you did there – “costs of running the air traffic system” only. Thus excluding the cost of building that system in the first place, and all the other costs of operating the air system. Just the cost of the TSA gropers at the airports is huge.
No, I want the governors to support this because it is a good, efficient transportation system. And to rise above political considerations of what party the proposer is from, or what party contributors will face competition from this. I’d prefer they think of the good of all the residents of their state, instead of just their supporters.
Realistically, that’s not likely to happen. But I was trying to answer the OP’s question, and point out that there political reasons, more than financial or technical ones, that lead governors to reject this funding.
Yes, we do. Especially a more efficient one, and one that will become increasingly so as oil prices rise. Despite what was ‘pointed out’, all transportation systems are ‘subsidized’, so we should try to keep them as efficient as possible, so our society gets the most benefit from our subsidy.
An interesting problem with high speed rail versus what you might term ordinary rail, is that as infrastructure goes, it adds little economic value. The issue is that good, useful, infrastructure supports commerce and industry. Especially industry. You want trains and roads to move produce, be it primary or manufactured. Moving people about only needs to move people to and from work. After that you are not doing the economy much good. People moving about the country are doing so for much less productive reasons. Tourism perhaps, some small number of business travellers, and it seems lots of people doing a lot of visiting. The economic benefit of investing in speeding up this travel is dubious. Indeed, cynically, the economy might be better served if such travel was made harder and more expensive.
That said, I’m a great fan of high quality high speed trains in the right setting. The French understand trains. Taking the TGV is an unbeatable way of moving around France. As has been noted above, you need to have the right population density to make it work. But where the Europeans don’t have it right is that they still rely vastly too much on road transport for freight. They would be much better served if they ran much more rail freight. But this doesn’t always mix well with high speed people. Rail freight done right requires a lot more infrastructure than just the railways.
And of course fuel is used for more than just driving on the interstate.
There is nothing efficient about a system that nobody will use. Governors, unlike members of Congress, are responsible for the budgets of their states.
It’s irresponsible to add bad debt to already overburdened budgets. The proposal involves borrowing Federal money that doesn’t exist so that States will then have to match money they don’t have.
The Florida system would run 100 MPH between Tampa and Orlando, connect with existing transportation infrastructure at the Orlando end and wouldn’t cost the State a dime, now or ever. Is that what you mean by subsidized?
If Disney & Busch Gardens want a high speed shuttle to their parks, then they should go in together and build it without taxpayer assistance
Existing mass transit in both Orlando and Tampa is terrible, because both are highly decentralized cities. Both of them have had most of their growth in the last 20-30 years, in the era when most people have cars, and urban planners designed accordingly.
I lived in 3 places in metro Orlando. All were 15-20 minutes from downtown (non-rush hour) via car. At all of them, a bus trip downtown would have involved walking somewhere from a few blocks to a half-mile to a bus stop (keep in mind the weather is usually 90 and humid), waiting for the bus (which almost never run more than once an hour), and then riding for 40 minutes to an hour to get downtown.
And if I was going downtown to take a train to Tampa, I’d likely be doing something similar on the other end.
People would love a high speed train that left each stop every 15 minutes and went to every interesting place on the planet. Since that’s never going to happen the next best thing is to be the conductor of a high speed vehicle that goes to every interesting place with no waiting and is available at all hours of the night.
We’ve had 2 periods of rail transportation in my state. They overlapped each other at the first half of the last century and they both died because they were limited by the very thing that made them economical, rails. The companies that ran them even went to the effort of creating places of interest to go along their routes to attract ridership.
City to city rail service isn’t enhanced much by cranking up the speed from 80 to 110 or 150 mph unless they were non-stop runs on fairly long routes. The hassle of connecting to them at each end kills most of the time savings involved.
Face it…if these boondoggles ever had a chance of being profitable, private investors would fund them.
The reason nobody wants them:
-they are hugely expensive (>$10 million/mile)
-unprofitable-they all lose money
-about to be obsoleted (by people working at home, via the Internet)
-prey to public worker’s unions, which will make them not just unprofitable, but absolute monet pits-Google Amtrak
Face it, anything the government is peddling will most likely be a costly boodoggle, that will cripple the communities they “serve”
Table HF-10 of Highway Statistics 2005 (Bureau of Transportation Statistics) is a nationwide summary of highway receipts and disbursements—covering all highways and local streets—which balanced out at $154,690 million each in 2005. It’s true that $39,214 million of the receipts shown are from non-user general revenues, but motorists in turn sent at least $59,543 million of user fees the other direction, to non-highway and mass transit uses.
So highway users fall 25 percent short of paying the total direct cost of highways and streets—but remember that this is looking at all streets, even local streets that existed long before there were motorists to pay fuel taxes.
An even more aggressive look at the topic suggests that government makes a $66 billion annual profit on streets and highways.
Given the history of the highway network (the Interstate system was a political nonstarter until Congress agreed to pay for it with fuel taxes on motorists only), I think it’s proper to say that motorists pay the entire cost of the numbered highway system, and about half the cost of local side streets.
What did Pawlenty have to do with a design error made in 1965?
Are you crazy? When I grew up in Milwaukee, we couldn’t wait to run to Madison for fun. You need to stop before you drive past Madison, some summer weekend. Walk around the Farmer’s Market, grab lunch on State Street, and end up at the Union Terrace, listening to a band as the sun sets over the lake.
BTW, what’s ironic is that my mom lives within blocks of where the train station would have been and says she’s getting too old to make the MKE-MAD drive to visit her grandkids. But because she’s a FoxNewsie, she just couldn’t admit that she’d have taken the train even if they’d built it.
It’s not ironic that your mother realizes her personal needs do not equal all of Wisconsin. Some peope understand basic math and the concept of balanced budgets. A weekend trip to the farmers market does not begin to pay for a rail system.
A vacation is an economic good. Just because you might not happen to value it doesn’t mean that it is not part of the economy.
I’m not a pure GDP-centric person: there are some activities that look good on paper but don’t really add to economic health. Vacations are not one of these activities.
Now, whether or not it’s worth it to build high-speed rail is another story. But all else being equal, a society where many people take vacation trips will have a greater economic production than one that produces exactly the same amount of good otherwise, but does not take those vacations. By definition.
I was reading an interesting column about the Orlando-Tampa HSR. The columnist mentioned that Disney runs a complimentary(free) bus service from the airport to the Disney Hotels. When I checked on it, I discovered that the service also takes your baggage claim tickets and picks up your bags for you and delivers them to to your room. This means that if you ride HSR to WDW, then you are paying for the privilege of schlepping your own bags.
http://disneyworld.disney.go.com/resorts/benefits/airport-service/
Also there is already a private bus line that run from Orlando Airport to Tampa Airport for $35. It seems to me that it would be a lot cheaper to pay them to expand their service than add HSR