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Opponents to rail fight like the devil to keep it from going into service because they fear it will attract too many passengers and become hard to kill. The fear is justified. TriRail in Florida was supposed to be temporary during road construction but has been going for decades now.
Horsehockey. Revisionist history. Yes it was an ADJUNCT to the roads intended to help commuters during construction. Ridership kept falling off and then rebuilding. Why? Because every few weeks (days during some periods) there would be massive delays on the system, far worse than any traffic jam.
There IS an alternative to both high speed rail and crowded roads. Rather than repeat myself, here is a link to my blog post on the subject: Chickpea Soup: April 2011
1. It is TOTALLY private funding with zero from the government. This in itself will prevent it from happening. It would create zero profit without subsidies.
2. The land was not forcefully taken from private landowners to build the railway.
Then Highways should be built privately , you can't say one form of Transport can't be built by the Govt vs another its stupid.... And Railway ROWs take a tiny amount of land compared to Roads...
Problem with Amtrak is that the right of ways are in areas where you do not have good ridership population and rotten stations outside of cities. Go on their map and look at it. Plan a bunch of trips and see -- not in CA, in real America, where you don't have thousands of riders per sq. mi. If I want to go from Buffalo to NY, it takes over 10 hours and it goes thru multiple cities, but people outside the citries? Forget them, no stations. Anytime I have taken Amtrak, it has been more like 12-13 hours to NYC. Shortest I know was a friend who took a redeye out of Penn to Buffalo in 9 hours. There are no dedicated tracks. They share with freight lines. Slows it all down, plus you pass the people who MIGHT take the train, outside of cities. The tracks are a mile from my house -- but the station is over 20 miles. Not efficient when the care goes out of the door and onto the road and we can pick faster routes..,.. and make NYC in 7 hours at full speed
I encourage all interested in this topic to read "Mobility" by Joseph Giglio, and read up on the Reason Foundations findings. As someone who worked in the tolling industry for several years I believe that is provides a better solution for transportation than high speed rail. Instead of high speed rail maybe but some rapid transit bus's that run up and down the tolled lanes, like they do in Minnesota. Either way, the infrastructure in this country is declining and there has to be something done to rebuild it. The government does not want to and can't afford to put out all the funds and risk associated with new transportation projects, so the way is through Public Private Partnerships(P3)'s.
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