Posted Feb 1, 2022, 7:58 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 3,159
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The interstate highway system has nothing to do with the military. It was built as a toll-free network in order to send the railroads into bankruptcy, and it didn't take long, since the railroads were still heavily regulated by the ICC and so couldn't save/invest their "excess" profits. The Penn Central bankruptcy - the largest in U.S. history until Enron, occurred just 15 years after the highway bill passed, and years before the highway network was fully built-out.
This followed the NYC IND strategy - build a competitor to a monopoly, watch it die thanks to old debts that anticipated continued monopoly status, then buy up the wreckage for cheap.
Amtrak has been kept in a moribund state so that people think "passenger rail can't work in the United States because the distances are further than in Europe and Japan".
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