Quote:
Originally Posted by mfastx
How does air "blow it away" on time?? Maybe air beats HSR a little time-wise, but many people are willing to trade off a little time for convenience. Again, this has been shown around the world, and even in our own country, where about half of the travelers in northeast cities choose rail. And that isn't even true HSR.
Well that's your opinion, and I disagree. All there is to it. You don't know for sure that HSR wouldn't be "great" for California. Can you find real-world examples? Can you name a place in the world where HSR has failed?
EDIT - Sorry for the messy post, for some reason it isn't "quoting" correctly.
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Fixed it for ya. It was just a minor misspelling in the code.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jg6544
The problem with the air/highway crowd is that they refuse to acknowledge something every other industrialized nation in the world has recognized, that rail is as important as highways are and as the air traffic system is.
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Air is a bit more complicated, but the key difference is that a double standard is being applied by the highway crowd.
They reason thus: Americans have a God-given right to cars and thus anything to do with them falls under public works.
But every other mode of transportation is private and should be expected to turn a profit to have a
raison d'être.
The problem with this is that there's a double standard. Only cars apply for the fulfillment of freedom of mobility.
...Part of the problem comes with the usage of that word, mobility. What we really mean is freedom of access. Freedom to go from Place A to Place B, whenever, however.
And so we can see where the problem comes in with a highway. A highway curtails which freedom...? for which freedom...? If you're going to see mobility as the core freedom being expressed, you're going to be able to justify highways as public works. Problem is, that can also be used to justify public railroads and public airlines (which was done in Europe, recall).
But, as I argue, the core freedom that needs to be addressed is one of access--of being able to
get from place to place--and when you think in those terms, the only reasonable solution, from the government's perspective, is to provide the most efficient access network possible. That means maximizing the amount of access enabled per investment.
That means that the only reasonable network worth public investment is the local streets and roads network.
Curtailing access for mobility is actually a subversion of the expressed freedom, if access is the critical freedom needing public guarantee.
When analyzed with this framework, it becomes clear that highways, rail, and air
all express mobility over access. Mobility can be taken as a freedom, a God-given right, as well, which would imply that all transportation systems are in the public domain.
Or...mobility can be taken as a luxury overlain on the core freedom of access. That allows it to be commoditized, and relinquished to the market. Highways, rail, and air in this regard become something worth paying for. Quantifying, as it were, your time.
(Before the passage of the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act--or something with a similar name--this was how the United States' federal government approached transportation policy.)
This would be the theory...In fact, however, the railroads were enabled by the government giving them their land for free. Very few railroads in the United States were built without some sort of capex subsidy--the land one being most dominant. The same goes for air travel, where the actual
facilities (airports) are the public's concern while the
equipment (planes) are the airline's concern. Prior to this subsidy, most major airlines utilized seaplanes rather than land facilities.
...In rail terms, this approach would be equivalent to a rail approach where the
infrastructure--the trackwork, signalling, and gateways (stations) are the public's concern--while the
equipment--the train cars themselves--is a private concern. This is essentially the approach being tried in Britain right now.
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