trade public transport for tax cuts?!!!
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ideasculptor at 01.22.09 - 10:03 am
Looks like Obama may have underfunded mass transit in the stimulus plan in order to finance tax cuts for 'short-term' stimulus.
Linky
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Booo. I hope this changes, I've been following the stimulus debate for a while. The latest draft I heard about includes about as much investment for rail as would be needed to ensure all passengers on Amtrak get complimentary pillows. Meanwhile every other developed or developing nation is great expanding it's rail investment, especially China with it's hundreds of billions going into rail in a really short time frame. No more new highways while existing ones crumble, and any new infrastructure should go toward mass transit, high speed rail, and infrastructure improvements for cyclist and pedestrians.
For more info on transit issues and petitions you can sign to pressure congress for smart transportation development, check out Transportation For America.
Transportation For America
GarySe7en01.22.09 - 12:01 pm
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take away public transit, regulate taxis for seniors, and give everyone bikes.
_iJunes01.22.09 - 12:55 pm
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spend money on actually building an infrastructure for bikes instead of blowing away all the money researching it.
_iJunes01.22.09 - 12:55 pm
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Trains are already tried and true, we're only scrambling to rebuild them after realizing what a colossal fuck-up it was to remove all the inter-urbans and Red-Cars 50-odd years ago!!!!
I mean, many of the current freeways that exist are actually built along former, Pacific Electric right-of-ways.
Then there's also the ease of rebuilding them after an earthquake.
I heard UPRR and BNSF got all their shit up and running 72 hours after Northridge.
The freeways on the other hand took months, if not year to be put back up to snuff.
bentstrider01.22.09 - 1:03 pm
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It's hardly scrambling to rebuild rail infrastructure at this point, if it were I'd be thrilled. Right now it is more along of the lines of realizing doh, automobile and airplane dependency kind of sucks, um maybe we should try some other stuff, but really better cars, um that will work better right? China, Spain and Russia, those are places that are actually scrambling toward rail.
GarySe7en01.22.09 - 1:35 pm
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Oh yeah and places with already amazing rail systems like France and Japan, they are scrambling toward even more to make truly comprehensive networks. Oh and add Taiwan to the list of scrambling toward rail.
GarySe7en01.22.09 - 1:37 pm
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yeah but compare france and japan to our land mass..
_iJunes01.22.09 - 1:39 pm
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I hear the land mass argument a lot but there are a number of corridors within the US with enough density to support successful high-speed rail service and those cooidors were studied for their viability during the Clinton administration. But when push came to shove the HSR ideas Clinton had got cut to create concesness with republicans. As it is the Acela almost kind of high speed rail in the Northwest has faster travel times between many cities then cars or planes. The proposed CA HSR system entering environmental study right now is similar in distance and population densities as the new Spanish line between Madrid and Barcelona.That train is now wildly successful with less then a year of operation and cutting heavily into air travel between those two cities even though at one time it was one of the highest trafficked air corridors in the world.
GarySe7en01.22.09 - 1:46 pm
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Here is a piece in Wired about the Spanish train:
The Train in Spain Replaces the Plane
http://blog.wired.com/cars/2009/01/passengers-floc.html
All this being said rail might not make sense in all instances, particularly long haul distances like coast to coast, which is the kind of flights planes are actually pretty efficient on, but nearly all short hop flights between cities of a few hundred miles of each other could be done for far less cost and in some cases even faster (for door to door travel time) then air travel.
GarySe7en01.22.09 - 1:50 pm
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"The Spanish government plans to have 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) of high-speed railway track in place by 2020, meaning 90 percent of Spain's population will live less than 50 kilometers from a bullet train station." -from Grist news
We will be lucky if we have San Fransisco to Los Angeles connected by HSR by then at the rate the US invests in rail development.
GarySe7en01.22.09 - 2:10 pm
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