An excellent transportation analysis and proposal

[urbanlife78]

Originally Posted by Roadking2003

So, name one thing that your link refutes. BTW, if you watched the video you would know that O'Toole proposed many alternatives to driving a private auto.

"in the real world, transit agencies have to balance contradictory demands to (a) maximize ridership and (b) provide a little bit of service everywhere regardless of ridership, both to meet demands for 'equity' and to serve the needs of transit-dependent persons."

Though I doubt that would work for you, and O'Toole's alternatives were a joke, just like he is.

[GregW]

I am amused how Konservative's cry about AMTRAK wasting their precious money when the say nothing about spending two billion dollars a WEEK in out absurd war in Afghanistan. I believe spending a couple of months of this wasted money on a National Rail Service would provide far more benefits to this country than some far off forgotten war in a place without any value what so ever.

Now back to page three of this thread.

[GregW]

Well I got through the rest of this thread.

IMHO - All of the natural monopolies such as rail passenger, and increasingly freight, transport should be publically owned and operated. These monopolies also include most municipal services as well as subsidized energy companies. Private enterprise must never be allowed to establish a monopolistic domination of any market. They must always compete in a free and open market. Anything else is not Free Market Capitalism.

As this thread is primarily about subsidizing AMTRAK and any other public transit system I will compare AMTRAK to the privately owned railroads. AMTRAK does not make a profit. Neither did the privately owned systems until they were completely deregulated and allowed to buy each other out until we arrived at five major railroads that have effective monopolies in their service areas. Even with effective monopolies did the private sector develop an safe oil transport car when they knew for years in advance that there would never be any pipelines carrying oil from the new producing areas developed with new technology. No, they did not. Why should they invest in a new system of tank car transport when the old cars were still available. Perhaps, although within the Federal Regulations restrictions, the old cars have a disturbing propensity to fall off the tracks and create an oil fueled inferno every month or so. Most of these happen where they do minor but spectacular damage but one wiped out the center of a small city in Canada killing almost fifty people. I consider that to be the private railroading sector in action.

As far as mass urban transport is concerned the government does a far better job than any private company could ever do. The goal of the government owned system is to provide transport for everyone that wants to used the train. The private system operated on only providing transport to those that can be carried at a profit. This greatly limits the routs available to the private entity. That is unacceptable to the public.

As I said above I would like to see the nation's passenger system completely updated so they could provide time efficient transport from city center to city center over distances of 1,000 miles or so. This would require high speed rail or similar devices on new right of way. (We just flew from MHT to MDW and it took about 4 hours from curb to curb. As that is about 800 miles it meant a 200 mph average even though the aircraft was going 600 mph. A 250 mph rail system would have taken about 3.5 hours to accomplish the same trip) Just building this system would provide thousands of jobs and building the equipment in the US would add tens of thousands of jobs in this country.

Requiring our Rail passenger system to use existing privately owned rails is one of the reasons it provides less then optimal service. When passenger travel was a private monopoly it made money for the railroads and was top priority. Even with the best it still took a rail passenger over 20 hours to get from NYC to Chicago. One hundred years later we can do better.

All of this could be paid for by a massive reduction in our Imperial adventures in the rest of the world. We should not even attempt to be the cops of the world. It costs us a major fortune and everyone being policed resents it. If the Arabs fear ISIS let them do something about it. If ISIS spreads to Europe let the Europeans do something about it. If it spreads to us we can just kill them wherever they appear.