Yurt
Gold Member
i would yes....but because of china? no...
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Amtrak? The post office of the transportation business.
Watch, $53 billion will become $150 billion and Amtrak will be more broke than ever as some douche bag bureaucrats puts rail lines in from Ottumwa to El Paso to placate their constituents, then they realize nobody travels from Ottumwa to El Paso.
what would you do, because the rest of the world is passing us by, while people like you and willowtwat cry about Spending.
Amtrak? The post office of the transportation business.
Watch, $53 billion will become $150 billion and Amtrak will be more broke than ever as some douche bag bureaucrats puts rail lines in from Ottumwa to El Paso to placate their constituents, then they realize nobody travels from Ottumwa to El Paso.
what would you do, because the rest of the world is passing us by, while people like you and willowtwat cry about Spending.
The problem that all advocates of high speed rail have is they are like the Germans invading Russia, they look at a map and have no clue just how far you are talking about. High speed rail is incredibly expensive, in all aspects. Land to build it on, the rails themselves, the trains and yes the electricity to run them. I see high speed rail linking key cities in the East some day and maybe Los Angeles and Seattle in the distant future. But coast to coast? Highly doubtful. I just see this as a nice opportunity to engage in some graft and corruption.
How much was the Big Dig supposed to cost? How much di it cost in the end?
That's the problem folks.
I don't think it would get the ridership
I take the Acela between New York and Boston and New York and DC. Both routes see high ridership but are on the fringe of the tradeoff between time and conenience. If you have a choice between a flight to Chicago taking two hours and a high speed train taking six, you will take the plane
I wonder if GE would be willing to help with the project ?
I wonder if GE would be willing to help with the project ?
They'll be up their eyeballs in the project.
What transmission lines?? The ones from the new nuke plants?? After the DC whores moved 14,000 factories overseas, there is plenty of electric capacity for HSR trains.
The problem that all advocates of high speed rail have is they are like the Germans invading Russia, they look at a map and have no clue just how far you are talking about. High speed rail is incredibly expensive, in all aspects. Land to build it on, the rails themselves, the trains and yes the electricity to run them. I see high speed rail linking key cities in the East some day and maybe Los Angeles and Seattle in the distant future. But coast to coast? Highly doubtful. I just see this as a nice opportunity to engage in some graft and corruption.
How much was the Big Dig supposed to cost? How much di it cost in the end?
That's the problem folks.
I don't think it would get the ridership
I take the Acela between New York and Boston and New York and DC. Both routes see high ridership but are on the fringe of the tradeoff between time and conenience. If you have a choice between a flight to Chicago taking two hours and a high speed train taking six, you will take the plane
Took an Amtrak from NYC to DC, by the time I traveled to Penn Station from Staten Island, caught the train, stopped in 85 towns.... I was exhausted and never did it again.
That's why so few people take Amtrak. It's outdated, slow, and yields to freight trains.The problem that all advocates of high speed rail have is they are like the Germans invading Russia, they look at a map and have no clue just how far you are talking about. High speed rail is incredibly expensive, in all aspects. Land to build it on, the rails themselves, the trains and yes the electricity to run them. I see high speed rail linking key cities in the East some day and maybe Los Angeles and Seattle in the distant future. But coast to coast? Highly doubtful. I just see this as a nice opportunity to engage in some graft and corruption.
How much was the Big Dig supposed to cost? How much di it cost in the end?
That's the problem folks.
I don't think it would get the ridership
I take the Acela between New York and Boston and New York and DC. Both routes see high ridership but are on the fringe of the tradeoff between time and conenience. If you have a choice between a flight to Chicago taking two hours and a high speed train taking six, you will take the plane
Took an Amtrak from NYC to DC, by the time I traveled to Penn Station from Staten Island, caught the train, stopped in 85 towns.... I was exhausted and never did it again.
The Interstate Highway system seemed like the way to go in 1950's. While we were building our highway system, Europe was extending their rail to cover just about every town and village on the continent.
Now we have a deteriorating highway system that's terribly inadequate and we can't afford to maintain it. In many of our major cities, traffic on Interstates creeps along at 30mph. The cost of getting to work is becoming a major financial problem. In Europe, rail is faster than ever. It's economical, comfortable, and almost pollution free. I was traveling through Europe a few years ago. Rail travel there is so much faster, nicer and cheaper than battling the freeways here. I will probably never see it, but I hope some day we might have such a system
What does high speed rail run on?
Electricity
The transmission lines can't handle it.
1. The lowball costs. CNN estimates that delivering on the plan could cost well over $500 billion and take decades to build, all while failing to cover much of the country at all. Internationally, only two high-speed rail lines have recouped their capital costs and all depend on huge subsidies to stay in operation.
2. The supposed benefits. "We're gonna be taking cars off of congested highways and reducing carbon emissions," says Vice President Joe Biden, an ardent rail booster. But most traffic jams are urban, not inter-city, so high-speed rail between metro areas will have no effect on your daily commute. And when construction costs are factored in, high-speed rail "may yield only marginal net greenhouse gas reductions," say UC-Berkeley researchers.
3. The delusional Amtrak example. Obama and Biden look to Amtrak as precedent, but since its founding in 1971, the nation's passenger rail system has sucked up almost $35 billion in subsidies and, says The Washington Post's Robert J. Samuelson, "a typical trip is subsidized by about $50." About 140 million Americans shlep to work every day, while Amtrak carries just 78,000 passengers. There's no reason to think that high-speed rail will pump up those numbers, though there's every reason to believe its costs will grow and grow.
I don't think it would get the ridership
I take the Acela between New York and Boston and New York and DC. Both routes see high ridership but are on the fringe of the tradeoff between time and conenience. If you have a choice between a flight to Chicago taking two hours and a high speed train taking six, you will take the plane
Took an Amtrak from NYC to DC, by the time I traveled to Penn Station from Staten Island, caught the train, stopped in 85 towns.... I was exhausted and never did it again.
The problem you need to solve is the future price of gas/energy.
At $3/gal we drive, at $5/gal or $10/gal then what? I'm not sure if we can all drive a Prius or Volt, or if HSR and telecommuting would work, or what we could do in 30 or 50 years when the cost of gas is prohibitive.
Nuclear power, or Breeder Reactors, or some new fuel-cell technology may get us to work. But going city to city will be an adventure if we don't get HSR and public transportation right. These systems take decades to develop, and we need to start soon before we hit the energy wall.
I don't think we will every replace our highway system, however I think we should be looking at supplemented it. Because of the cost of building a transportation system, we need to be looking into the distant future. We have no way of knowing just how high gas prices will rise before we replace gasoline with another energy source, but it's a pretty good bet that we will see $5/gal before long and probably $10/gal with 10 years or so. We know just about everything is getting faster, our communications, our computers, our manufacturing; that is just about everything except our transportation. If anything it's getting slower. As we move into the 21st century we need to get products to market faster. We need to spend less time commuting. Currently we spend about 150 billion hours a year commuting and it's increasing.The Interstate Highway system seemed like the way to go in 1950's. While we were building our highway system, Europe was extending their rail to cover just about every town and village on the continent.
Now we have a deteriorating highway system that's terribly inadequate and we can't afford to maintain it. In many of our major cities, traffic on Interstates creeps along at 30mph. The cost of getting to work is becoming a major financial problem. In Europe, rail is faster than ever. It's economical, comfortable, and almost pollution free. I was traveling through Europe a few years ago. Rail travel there is so much faster, nicer and cheaper than battling the freeways here. I will probably never see it, but I hope some day we might have such a system
Our interstates can be built a lot better. Think autobahn here, they are much better constructed then are our highways. Once again though, you look at a map and ignore the simple fact that Germany is smaller than the state of Texas, by a long way. Europe, all of it is smaller than the continental US. Coast to coast will allmost certainly ALLWAYS be cheaper and much more efficient by air.