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Location: Live:Downtown Phoenix, AZ/Work:Greater Los Angeles, CA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lifeexplorer
Because it is a large GOVERNMENT sponsored problem that will help the people, particularly the poor, and it makes no profit and is at the taxpayers expense. Anything related to government and losing money makes leftists happy.
Had the light rail been commercially viable, it would have been built by private companies long time ago.
Private companies could never do mass transit, they would have to charge at least 8 times the fair compared to public mass transit. Most people couldn't afford $20-$30 for a one way ticket
Maybe but your aging parents may not have to come to live with you and you may not have to pay to put them in nursing homes if robot maids will clean for them, cook for them and give them their medicine and self driving cars will take them and their robot maids shopping and sightseeing because it will let them be independent longer.
This thread isn't about trains, but here's an example of a trip a person in the suburbs of my city has to take to get to the center of town by train every morning:
(1) Drive to a parking spot somewhat close to the train station (there are not nearly enough parking spots at the train station, so you usually have to end up parking 1/4 to 1/2 mile away).
(2) Hike to the train station from your car.
(3) Ride the train to the south end of downtown.
(4) Walk or bus to the center of downtown.
And the cost of that trip is $4.75 if I remember correctly. So there-and-back would be 8 steps and cost $9.50 for a day or about $200/month. That's in addition to car insurance and gas that you're having to pay since you still need to own a car. It would be cheaper, although perhaps less convenient on average, to drive to work.
I'm not a car-lover and I do support public spending on transportation infrastructure and services, but I just get ticked off at seeing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars get spent on public transportation that we end up paying an arm and a leg to use and only solves about 1% of the transportation problems.
And if you're in a major metro where it takes well over an hour to get there by car you taker the train that takes 20-30 mins, wasting far less of your time inching along unproductively on the road, unless you're one of those idiots that makes the congestion even worse by thinking that you can dick around on your phone during the traffic jam.
You also conveniently leave out that taking the train is COMPLETELY OPTIONAL, nobody is forcing you to take it.
Because it is a large GOVERNMENT sponsored problem that will help the people, particularly the poor, and it makes no profit and is at the taxpayers expense. Anything related to government and losing money makes leftists happy.
Had the light rail been commercially viable, it would have been built by private companies long time ago.
Tell me, how many interstates are corporately owned, maintained and turn a profit?
I am still bitter about my state voting for a $50 billion light rail system. I use public transportation and can tell you that the metro buses are perfectly fine except that there aren't enough of them. For way less than $1 billion they could simply buy more buses and hire more bus drivers.
Don't tell me I'm "not thinking long-term." The quintessential definition of short-term thinking is to create a fixed route from points A to B that will take decades for taxpayers to pay off and decades to build. By the way, when it finally is built and paid off, you liberals think that it'll be a free public utility. Yea, right. You'll be paying $10 each way, whereas if you traveled in one of the nice transit buses you would have your own comfortable forward-facing seat and wifi for $2.75.
Light rail to nowhere is the dems panacea for everything from cancer to world peace and full employment.
Private companies could never do mass transit, they would have to charge at least 8 times the fair compared to public mass transit. Most people couldn't afford $20-$30 for a one way ticket
Exactly what I said, anyway to hemorrhage taxpayers' money to make the leftists feel good attracts them like a giant turd attracts flies.
Last edited by lifeexplorer; 02-27-2017 at 12:29 PM..
Tell me, how many interstates are corporately owned, maintained and turn a profit?
Government monopoly doesn't prove it's only way to do things. It only proves monopoly sucks!
Do you know how many things are interstate, actually, international, and are corporately owned AND are turning YUGE profits?
Yes, virtually everything we use, from your keyboard to toilet paper, except a few government funded programs, is international, corporately owned and PROFITABLE!
Private companies could never do mass transit, they would have to charge at least 8 times the fair compared to public mass transit. Most people couldn't afford $20-$30 for a one way ticket
Private companies could, they have a profit incentive where the government is horrible at almost everything it does and inefficient at everything it does.
IF we applied that policy to our ill-advised wars of choice we'd have more than enough $$$ in th ebudget for the infrastructure improvements we need, be they roads and/or rails.
Conservatives would rather flush several trillion dollars down the toilet endlessly invading countries like Iraq and Syria that never did anything to us while giving us nothing in return, than spend a nickel on something that is actually useful to the citizenry.
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