A century ago was before Ford revolutionized automobiles and all of industry. BTW do you have a link for that picture you posted. I was wanting to get more info from the source.
You must be young and unaware of your parents tax procedure... scholls are most certainly not free... maybe for illegals school is free.
movin peeps 4 bizness?.............id rather dey jus put dat money in optikal networks 4 more internetz.......
I was talking about free to use. I understand School taxes. This seed money for high speed rail is also coming from taxes. People that don't pay school taxes get to send their children to school for free, but do you think people can ride these trains for free? If it is a public good, shouldn't it be free to use like most roads?
It would be cool to have high speed rail from one city to another, but the reasons behind it are just foolish...might as well invest the cash in local city projects of light rail... America's vision should be to improve transport within each metro city, then once it has been optimized...connect other major metro city's...that should be the plan... You dont just connect metro cities first...and then figure out local transport...ie. If i were going from Boston to NYC, it would be conveinient to do so, bc once i get to NYC, i can use the local subways, trains, buses, and taxis... This is not the case if we connect Houston and New Orleans, or Houston and Dallas...bc once i get to either destination, i would need to rent a car and do etc etc... might as well just fly... The public goal for high speed transport is to improve high speed transport within the city first, and then as a long term outlook connect those cities with on another...O-bozo the clown has it backwards...
I couldn't have said this better. If i take the train to Dallas to save 2 hours, then I have to rent a car to drive around dallas. I am either going to drive to have my car, or fly. Plus the airline industry is not going to let this happen. Then they won't be able to charge crazy fares.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/08/u_s_high_speed_rail_map_artist_alfred_twu_s_alternate_reality.html
The goal is to do both and there is a lot of investment in local transit. High speed rail's competition isn't the car but it is airplanes. As flight capacity and demand has increased our air infrastructure is struggling to keep up. Things like new runways, airports, radar and etc.. aren't cheap and also take up a lot of land. Further you can't build new airports near downtowns because land cost and noise issues. You can though use existing rail corridors and stations to bring high speed rail right into downtowns like the Chunnel does between London and Paris. For those of you complaining about renting a car if you have to fly into many metro areas the airport is far away from the city center. In many of those cases even if the city has internal transit it is still difficult to get from the airport to that transit. With high speed rail though you can just connect it up to the existing transit line.
Urban density matters to high speed rail as much as it matters to airlines. This isn't about creating a transit corridor with a lot of stops but about going from city to city.
what? this is high speed rail. you're talking about crossing long distances with few stops. that's the point of high speed rail. this is an alternative to air travel and to interstate travel...neither of which are assisted by urban density. if there were urban density you couldn't have high speed rail. it reaches high speeds in areas that are very specifically and intentionally not dense in population.
public universities are funded by tax payer dollars, is a public good, yet still have no problem charging students thousands of dollars in tuition. there is nothing at all rare about having a tax funded rail system that also charges for tickets. Absolutely nothing.
I don't think it's quite that simple. Lots of people though the Interstate system was uneccessary, it was only built because one president had a goal and he got people to get behind the cause. Our airways are very crowded. I'd argue that the demand is there.
