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Old 04-29-2012, 03:39 PM
 
Location: On the Rails in Northern NJ
12,380 posts, read 26,793,677 times
Reputation: 4580

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Texas Liberal View Post
I don't know. You may be right. But most of the driving that Americans do is not the fun variety. Most of it is just commuting. I think Americans will be happy to let computer handle that type of boring driving.
They tried to do this in Japan and the Japanese weren't having it , same with some trains over there they won't go Auto....and going auto could make things worse not better...
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Old 05-01-2012, 08:57 AM
 
2,206 posts, read 4,733,614 times
Reputation: 2103
This is nuts.

Are you a paid push troller for the light rail makers?

The economics are not there and never have been.

Rail cannot compete with cars.
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Old 05-01-2012, 12:25 PM
 
Location: On the Rails in Northern NJ
12,380 posts, read 26,793,677 times
Reputation: 4580
Quote:
Originally Posted by TX75007 View Post
This is nuts.

Are you a paid push troller for the light rail makers?

The economics are not there and never have been.

Rail cannot compete with cars.
Orly , it does everyday all over the US......so a car can go 220mph?
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Old 05-01-2012, 03:12 PM
 
Location: Austin, TX
1,825 posts, read 2,819,676 times
Reputation: 1627
I recommend Daniel Yergin's "The Quest" for an interesting analysis of the energy market, including the United States' approach (versus, say, China's, France's, or Russia's). It also addresses Peak Oil, though in a critical capacity of "here is what we are talking about and how we try to answer the question" and not "here is the definitive answer."

The short version is that, if we wanted to expand the United States' oil production significantly, we could -- it is politics and not a lack of resources that is why we aren't doing so. Same with nuclear power, though that may be (slowly) changing.

Both issues have become less crucial in the short term with the glut of natural gas in the United States. I don't think any of this will have much of an impact on high speed rail for a state like Texas. It's too big, too spread out, and not dense enough. The math just doesn't work. I wish it would ... but it doesn't.
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Old 05-01-2012, 05:32 PM
 
118 posts, read 272,580 times
Reputation: 132
Quote:
Originally Posted by TX75007 View Post
This is nuts.

Are you a paid push troller for the light rail makers?

The economics are not there and never have been.

Rail cannot compete with cars.
Actually this thread is about HSR, which hardly "light rail".

Light rail systems are useful in many places.

HSR is about high speed trains to connect cities together. HSR has many problems, but worst of all it is intended to solve a problem that doesn't even exist. Our traffic congestion problems in Texas are caused by commuter traffic from suburbs to the city center or suburb to suburb, there is no congestion of traffic traveling from one city to another.
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Old 05-01-2012, 05:55 PM
 
Location: World
4,204 posts, read 4,670,626 times
Reputation: 2841
there is congestion or demand for non car means of transportation between many cities of texas. a train between san antonio and austin will do well. a train between dallas and houston will do fine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Texas Liberal View Post
Actually this thread is about HSR, which hardly "light rail".

Light rail systems are useful in many places.

HSR is about high speed trains to connect cities together. HSR has many problems, but worst of all it is intended to solve a problem that doesn't even exist. Our traffic congestion problems in Texas are caused by commuter traffic from suburbs to the city center or suburb to suburb, there is no congestion of traffic traveling from one city to another.
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Old 05-01-2012, 07:59 PM
 
48,505 posts, read 96,644,082 times
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As log as they pay fpor themsleves the rails can have at it.The problem I see is they can't and there is not nay money to spend on it anytime in near future.
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Old 05-02-2012, 05:09 AM
 
Location: World
4,204 posts, read 4,670,626 times
Reputation: 2841
Roads, Interstate Highways - only 50% of the amount spent on them is paid thru gas tax. rest is on tax payers money-that is socialism. by contrats Amtrak - 62% of its expenses are covered thru passenger tickets. Yet conservatives do not say anything against highways.
Quote:
Originally Posted by texdav View Post
As log as they pay fpor themsleves the rails can have at it.The problem I see is they can't and there is not nay money to spend on it anytime in near future.
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Old 05-02-2012, 10:52 AM
 
Location: Austin, TX
1,825 posts, read 2,819,676 times
Reputation: 1627
"Socialism" as a label does not apply much to this discussion as mass transit and highways are considered even by libertarians to fall under the umbrella of "things government ought to do." The extent to which government policies may be command-and-control enough to be called "socialist" is more a question of purpose (e.g. 'what are we trying to do here') than cost ('this can't pay for itself and we're going to subsidize it').

Conservatives get up in arms over the federal government holding highway funds hostage by requiring states to comply with all kinds of things states aren't legally required to comply with, usually in the social policy area.

Straight percentages also don't paint a complete picture. Roads cost an order of magnitude less to put in and they can (with careful planning) scale to meet the population's needs. Roads are the path of least resistance for any type of expansion: by the time you have a local government, you have some kind of roads department. Tough to have people without roads of some kind.

Mass transit requires a high population density before it's even feasible to think about it. This takes a couple of forms. You can either have a single metro area that is sufficiently large so as to fund rail (NYC, DC, SF) or you can have several metro areas close enough together that linking them will make up the difference even if neither metro area has enough local density to support rail. This is what a lot of cities in Italy look like: the inter-city rail in Italy is great because you have lots of metro areas in a straight line all up and down the country, though the intra-city options vary quite a lot.

It's a false choice to look at this issue as a "roads versus rail" question. You can't not have roads. You can stop expanding the roads and invest in rail as an alternative, but you're not going to succeed in getting cars off the roads unless you also have strong local transit options -- that is, you enable people to live in a major Texas city while not having a car. That's pretty unlikely just given how large Texas is. It's not a conspiracy by oil companies. Even in Jersey where NJ Transit covers a huge portion of the state, it's inter-city, not intra-city -- Jersey's roads are tremendously clogged. Only in places like SF and NYC where it is both prohibitively expensive to keep a car and you can feasibly get by without one do you have the conditions necessary for both inter- and intra-city rail, and even then the inter-city options (Metro North in NYC, for example) are pretty expensive.
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Old 05-02-2012, 12:09 PM
 
Location: Chandler, AZ
3,285 posts, read 2,647,020 times
Reputation: 8225
Quote:
Originally Posted by Revilo87 View Post
Idk, all I know is that where it exists in Europe and Asia, it seems to be doing fine.
Anything "does fine" when it's very heavily subsidized.

Do you want to see your tax burden literally doubled, if not more, to have high speed trains? I don't.

The reason we don't have high-speed rail is nobody really wants it. They'd love to be able to take a fast train, but they don't want to pay what it would actually cost. It's like why the Concorde died... crossing the Atlantic at Mach 2 and getting to London or Paris in 3.5 hours was great, but tickets starting at $10,000 (in 1970/80s dollars!) was not. Everyone would have liked to fly, few were willing to pay the freight.

You can also look to California for a high-speed rail project dreamed up by politicians and put before an ignorant electorate for a vote. The costs soared. The original estimate nearly tripled, and then they "saved" money by scaling way back. They've paid hundreds of millions so far and have nothing to show for it.

If it was worth building, the private sector would build it.
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