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I just rode the Southwest Chief from New Mexico to Illinois and back, last month. Had a long talk with one of the conductors while on the trip. We discussed th

I just rode the Southwest Chief from New Mexico to Illinois and back, last month. Had a long talk with one of the conductors while on the trip. We discussed the remarkable pattern that the Republicans follow: starve everything they don't like (or that they want to privatize so they can pocket the money), then use the subsequent difficulties and failures and budget shortfalls of the starved agency as proof that the agency can't function and deserves being shut down. They do this with Amtrak, they do it with the State Department, they do it with public schools, they do it with state universities, with healthcare, with prisons, with everything they want to privatize. Funny, they do this with minorities too. Systematically deny them, over many generations, a good education, decent healthcare, safe neighborhoods, ability to vote, and economic opportunity, and then blame them for being uneducated, unhealthy, unsafe, frauds during elections, and for not contributing to the overall economy. Funny how the Rs' playbook is the same everywhere you look. As for Amtrak, all the transcontinental routes are in jeopardy, the conductor told me. It's only a matter of time before they're gone. No other civilized country in the world has such lousy transportation infrastructure. Especially trains. The U.S. should have bullet trains going everywhere, but no.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> The U.S. should have bullet trains going everywhere I love trains, but I disagree. Trains outperform cars and planes in regional contexts. Cross-country rail, if it’s maintained, needs to be explicitly subsidised. Given voters in the middle of the country prefer to scrap their regional transportation infrastructure, I—as a coastal taxpayer—am fine with that.
mason55 8y ago
It’s called “starve the beast” and it’s an actual tactic
- brianstorms 8y ago
  Indeed. There is an excellent film documentary by that very name that documents how they're starving public universities across the country and how some may go bankrupt soon. The irony is, the Rs collectively are the beast, and if we were honest we'd see that their strategy is actually Feed the Beast all the way. Redirect public money to private profit.
  - briandear 8y ago
    The thing is, it isn’t “public” money — it’s my money and your money. It doesn’t belong to the government; it belongs to the people that earn it. And, we should have a right to require better public stewardship of the funds we pay. As far as public universities going bankrupt, citations definitely needed. In conservative Texas, universities seem to be operating just fine. Perhaps a solution is to restrict usage of federal student loan funds to only public schools. Federal student loans currently are being used to subsidize the operation of immensely wealthy private institutions. Harvard has billions in endowment, yet the taxpayer still gets to subsidize loans for students that go there. How is that fair? Perhaps we should tax the endowments of private schools and get them to start paying their fair share? It’s more fair than taxing me more. If we tax the rich to pay for the poor, should we tax the rich schools o pay for the poor schools? Why should I subsidize Harvard?
  - nashashmi 8y ago
    Troll language: their strategy is actually Feed the Beast all the way. Redirect public money to private profit.
- king_nothing 8y ago
  We have to be careful, with some nuance, which “beast” is “starved.” We can’t just cut off funding of vital food assistance programs arbitrarily like SNAP cuts going into effect September 1, 2018 when poor/disabled people on razor-thin fixed-incomes depend on it to survive. Cut funding to specific, unneeded pet pork projects within the Pentagon and such to save money... don’t just hack/slash with a blindfold.
briandear 8y ago
What was the cost from New Mexico to Illinois? How long did it take? How long would a bullet take? How much does a SWA flight from Phoenix to Midway cost? How long does it take? The idea of a cross country train in the US is just ridiculous. Lay (and maintain) thousands of miles of track when an airplane just needs a place to land and some maintenance of the aircraft itself and you’re done. You don’t have to negotiate thousands of miles of right of way — with all the politics that involves, not to mention the extraordinary construction and maintenance costs. Even if you used existing freight rail, that can’t simply be used for high speed. Anyone taking a long distance train in the US is doing it out of nostalgia or out of contrarian quirkiness or just for the tourist value of it. We have an amazing interstate highway system and buses that run everywhere — yet the only people that take buses do so because they have no other choice — they would all rather fly than be packed on a bus for 12+ trips. I can go to Tokyo in that amount of time, but some people long for the ability to enjoy that length of trip to go from New Mexico to Illinois? We should be making air travel better, not dwelling on 19th century nostalgia. However, When it comes to commuter-level travel, such as Sacramento to San Francisco or similar types of trips, then certainly rail is a great option because the economics make sense. The other problem with trains is that as population and economic centers shift, it take years before train systems can respond — you have to actually build more track to change the system. Airplanes can change routes anytime they want (regulatory approvals notwithstanding.) Even in Europe where trains are icons, try taking a train from Marseille to Geneva. It’s an 8 hour trip requiring two connections. It’s a 45 minute flight at a similar cost. No normal person is going to chose an 8 hour train ride over a 45 minute flight. Even with heavy subsidization of trains by the French government, the costs are still almost identical. If you remove the subsidy, long distance trains quickly become economically ridiculous compared to airplanes. If you were to remove the huge taxes on air travel, it would be even cheaper. No business traveler going from LA to Chicago is going to waste days on a train if given the choice. It’s progress in my mind to eliminate transcontinental passenger trains. We should be looking up and not back.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  According to google, Geneva to marseille is only less than 4 hours with a transfer from one TGV to another. https://www.google.com/maps?q=marseille+to+geneva&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiAxdih-vTbAhUHHjQIHfehD9sQ_AUIEigC https://www.google.com/maps?q=marseille+to+geneva&oe=UTF-8&h... Considering airport transit/check-in time, that makes it pretty competitive with taking a short plane trip. Looking at it now, there is a direct Lyria train that takes 3 and a half hours.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
e40 8y ago
We discussed the remarkable pattern that the Republicans follow... Well said. I've been saying a form of this for years (probably not as articulately as you), but I've noticed recently that more and more people seem to be getting it. This is a good thing, because once enough people understand this is what they are about, then it will become less effective.
king_nothing 8y ago
Totally false. J/K. Thom Hartmann laments this every so often. It truly is a conflict-via-propaganda-without-any-constructive-policy gambit that is like crybullying meets victim-blaming, perhaps to appease the angst of the GOP base by expedience, since it’s always worked, instead of leading constructively. The problem of populism without “informatism” (coining a term for pragmatic education on current issues, interests and policy) leads to the tyranny of mob rule by manufactured consent, demagoguery and fashionable memes; voting should be a privilege, not an automatic right, of those whom undertake continuous, thoughtful personal enrichment, development of good judgement and awareness. No voter id laws, no direct costs and no IQ tests, just tests focusing on substance and judgement, perhaps with a panel interview for those whom pass the written ones. It does take a shift in thinking about what a representative democracy (psephocracy) values, and that it’s not and never was a panacea for “perfect” governance, but it shouldn’t be worshipped as gospel, lionize unbridled power and corruption of mob tyranny, nor elitism of only those whom hold “approved” views. No republic has so far survived beyond an avg of ~10 generations (~250 years) due to the entropy of forgetting/misunderstanding/not applying the founders’ beliefs, unable lead/reform themselves, corruption by the elites insulating themselves in the halls of power and people tuning-out from the drama of mismanagement.
jcranmer 8y ago
> No other civilized country in the world has such lousy transportation infrastructure. Especially trains. The U.S. should have bullet trains going everywhere, but no. It depends on what metric you use. The US freight rail system is the envy of the world, for example. The reality is that HSR isn't cost-effective if the trip takes more than about 5 hours. When you superimpose that time limit on the US, there's rather few viable HSR routes. A Chicago/NYC run is at that very margin of viability--and compared to most European countries, that's a longer trip than travelling from one border to another. It's quite easy to set up routes in UK or in Germany that hit all of the major cities in fairly short order, but that task is impossible in the US. Especially grating is the lack of collinearity between major cities; the Midwest in particular ends up having to be a star topology, since Chicago-X doesn't include multiple cities, and there's no route useful enough to be worth bypassing Chicago.
- notlob 8y ago
  > The reality is that HSR isn't cost-effective if the trip takes more than about 5 hours. Can you expand on that? It's not obvious to me.
  - 1stcity3rdcoast 8y ago
    It’s certainly not cost-effective on a relative basis when compared to air travel. The Delta Shuttle runs Chicago-NY-DC every hour on the half hour for a song. Hard to compete with that on rail. With rail you do get the benefit of landing in the middle of the city rather than an airport 30 mins from city center, but it’s still far less expensive in both time and money to fly when the trip exceeds about 4 or 5 hours.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      And, indeed, high-speed rail isn't very price competitive with budget air a lot of the time either. Doesn't mean it's a bad idea; transporting a lot of people who are willing to pay a premium off the roads and out of airports may well be a net win. But understand that it's premium travel.
  - 8y ago
coredog64 8y ago
The US is the leader when it comes to freight transport via rail. That's why our passenger rail is so crappy -- rail transport companies make plenty of money with freight and have zero interest in messing it up by having barely loaded passenger trains use the lines. I would also add that there is this really large mountain range that divides the heavily populated West Coast from the rest of the continent. Anyone who has ever driven on I-90, I-40, I-10, or I-8 between can tell you just how large it is. The lowest pass I can think of is ~4000 feet. There are a few European rail routes that go that high, but there are zero bullet trains that do.
- betterunix2 8y ago
  There is far more to the story than freight companies being uninterested in serving passenger trains. There is also the fact that many of the efficient routes we had a century ago are gone, in some cases even the tracks have been removed; the fact that railroads must compete with heavily subsidized highways and airports; and the fact that we over-regulate passenger rail service (compared to Europe, our trains are much heavier and more expensive to operate). There is also the chronic under-investment in local public transit throughout the country, which makes trains less convenient in the numerous medium-sized cities that exist between major metropolitan areas. Amtrak also inherited "deferred maintenance" at its various stations and on the Northeast Corridor, and they are still trying to dig out of that hole (the fact that their funding is approved annually makes some of the larger projects difficult to plan).
783629gasd 8y ago
A Republican actually created Amtrak, in case you didn't know.
- betterunix2 8y ago
  With the intention of the whole project failing: http://www.railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=164320 http://www.railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=164320
- jwhitlark 8y ago
  The Republican party used to have a brain, soul and guts, even if it was wrong on a number of issues. Now it's just mouth and a bad attitude. Both Lincoln and Reagan would be disappointed.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> The U.S. should have bullet trains going everywhere I love trains, but I disagree. Trains outperform cars and planes in regional contexts. Cross-country rail, if it’s maintained, needs to be explicitly subsidised. Given voters in the middle of the country prefer to scrap their regional transportation infrastructure, I—as a coastal taxpayer—am fine with that.

mason55 8y ago

It’s called “starve the beast” and it’s an actual tactic

brianstorms 8y ago
Indeed. There is an excellent film documentary by that very name that documents how they're starving public universities across the country and how some may go bankrupt soon. The irony is, the Rs collectively are the beast, and if we were honest we'd see that their strategy is actually Feed the Beast all the way. Redirect public money to private profit.
- briandear 8y ago
  The thing is, it isn’t “public” money — it’s my money and your money. It doesn’t belong to the government; it belongs to the people that earn it. And, we should have a right to require better public stewardship of the funds we pay. As far as public universities going bankrupt, citations definitely needed. In conservative Texas, universities seem to be operating just fine. Perhaps a solution is to restrict usage of federal student loan funds to only public schools. Federal student loans currently are being used to subsidize the operation of immensely wealthy private institutions. Harvard has billions in endowment, yet the taxpayer still gets to subsidize loans for students that go there. How is that fair? Perhaps we should tax the endowments of private schools and get them to start paying their fair share? It’s more fair than taxing me more. If we tax the rich to pay for the poor, should we tax the rich schools o pay for the poor schools? Why should I subsidize Harvard?
- nashashmi 8y ago
  Troll language: their strategy is actually Feed the Beast all the way. Redirect public money to private profit.
king_nothing 8y ago
We have to be careful, with some nuance, which “beast” is “starved.” We can’t just cut off funding of vital food assistance programs arbitrarily like SNAP cuts going into effect September 1, 2018 when poor/disabled people on razor-thin fixed-incomes depend on it to survive. Cut funding to specific, unneeded pet pork projects within the Pentagon and such to save money... don’t just hack/slash with a blindfold.

briandear 8y ago

What was the cost from New Mexico to Illinois? How long did it take? How long would a bullet take? How much does a SWA flight from Phoenix to Midway cost? How long does it take? The idea of a cross country train in the US is just ridiculous. Lay (and maintain) thousands of miles of track when an airplane just needs a place to land and some maintenance of the aircraft itself and you’re done. You don’t have to negotiate thousands of miles of right of way — with all the politics that involves, not to mention the extraordinary construction and maintenance costs. Even if you used existing freight rail, that can’t simply be used for high speed. Anyone taking a long distance train in the US is doing it out of nostalgia or out of contrarian quirkiness or just for the tourist value of it. We have an amazing interstate highway system and buses that run everywhere — yet the only people that take buses do so because they have no other choice — they would all rather fly than be packed on a bus for 12+ trips. I can go to Tokyo in that amount of time, but some people long for the ability to enjoy that length of trip to go from New Mexico to Illinois? We should be making air travel better, not dwelling on 19th century nostalgia. However, When it comes to commuter-level travel, such as Sacramento to San Francisco or similar types of trips, then certainly rail is a great option because the economics make sense. The other problem with trains is that as population and economic centers shift, it take years before train systems can respond — you have to actually build more track to change the system. Airplanes can change routes anytime they want (regulatory approvals notwithstanding.) Even in Europe where trains are icons, try taking a train from Marseille to Geneva. It’s an 8 hour trip requiring two connections. It’s a 45 minute flight at a similar cost. No normal person is going to chose an 8 hour train ride over a 45 minute flight. Even with heavy subsidization of trains by the French government, the costs are still almost identical. If you remove the subsidy, long distance trains quickly become economically ridiculous compared to airplanes. If you were to remove the huge taxes on air travel, it would be even cheaper. No business traveler going from LA to Chicago is going to waste days on a train if given the choice. It’s progress in my mind to eliminate transcontinental passenger trains. We should be looking up and not back.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
According to google, Geneva to marseille is only less than 4 hours with a transfer from one TGV to another. https://www.google.com/maps?q=marseille+to+geneva&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiAxdih-vTbAhUHHjQIHfehD9sQ_AUIEigC https://www.google.com/maps?q=marseille+to+geneva&oe=UTF-8&h... Considering airport transit/check-in time, that makes it pretty competitive with taking a short plane trip. Looking at it now, there is a direct Lyria train that takes 3 and a half hours.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

e40 8y ago

We discussed the remarkable pattern that the Republicans follow... Well said. I've been saying a form of this for years (probably not as articulately as you), but I've noticed recently that more and more people seem to be getting it. This is a good thing, because once enough people understand this is what they are about, then it will become less effective.

king_nothing 8y ago

Totally false. J/K. Thom Hartmann laments this every so often. It truly is a conflict-via-propaganda-without-any-constructive-policy gambit that is like crybullying meets victim-blaming, perhaps to appease the angst of the GOP base by expedience, since it’s always worked, instead of leading constructively. The problem of populism without “informatism” (coining a term for pragmatic education on current issues, interests and policy) leads to the tyranny of mob rule by manufactured consent, demagoguery and fashionable memes; voting should be a privilege, not an automatic right, of those whom undertake continuous, thoughtful personal enrichment, development of good judgement and awareness. No voter id laws, no direct costs and no IQ tests, just tests focusing on substance and judgement, perhaps with a panel interview for those whom pass the written ones. It does take a shift in thinking about what a representative democracy (psephocracy) values, and that it’s not and never was a panacea for “perfect” governance, but it shouldn’t be worshipped as gospel, lionize unbridled power and corruption of mob tyranny, nor elitism of only those whom hold “approved” views. No republic has so far survived beyond an avg of ~10 generations (~250 years) due to the entropy of forgetting/misunderstanding/not applying the founders’ beliefs, unable lead/reform themselves, corruption by the elites insulating themselves in the halls of power and people tuning-out from the drama of mismanagement.

jcranmer 8y ago

> No other civilized country in the world has such lousy transportation infrastructure. Especially trains. The U.S. should have bullet trains going everywhere, but no. It depends on what metric you use. The US freight rail system is the envy of the world, for example. The reality is that HSR isn't cost-effective if the trip takes more than about 5 hours. When you superimpose that time limit on the US, there's rather few viable HSR routes. A Chicago/NYC run is at that very margin of viability--and compared to most European countries, that's a longer trip than travelling from one border to another. It's quite easy to set up routes in UK or in Germany that hit all of the major cities in fairly short order, but that task is impossible in the US. Especially grating is the lack of collinearity between major cities; the Midwest in particular ends up having to be a star topology, since Chicago-X doesn't include multiple cities, and there's no route useful enough to be worth bypassing Chicago.

notlob 8y ago
> The reality is that HSR isn't cost-effective if the trip takes more than about 5 hours. Can you expand on that? It's not obvious to me.
- 1stcity3rdcoast 8y ago
  It’s certainly not cost-effective on a relative basis when compared to air travel. The Delta Shuttle runs Chicago-NY-DC every hour on the half hour for a song. Hard to compete with that on rail. With rail you do get the benefit of landing in the middle of the city rather than an airport 30 mins from city center, but it’s still far less expensive in both time and money to fly when the trip exceeds about 4 or 5 hours.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    And, indeed, high-speed rail isn't very price competitive with budget air a lot of the time either. Doesn't mean it's a bad idea; transporting a lot of people who are willing to pay a premium off the roads and out of airports may well be a net win. But understand that it's premium travel.
- 8y ago

coredog64 8y ago

The US is the leader when it comes to freight transport via rail. That's why our passenger rail is so crappy -- rail transport companies make plenty of money with freight and have zero interest in messing it up by having barely loaded passenger trains use the lines. I would also add that there is this really large mountain range that divides the heavily populated West Coast from the rest of the continent. Anyone who has ever driven on I-90, I-40, I-10, or I-8 between can tell you just how large it is. The lowest pass I can think of is ~4000 feet. There are a few European rail routes that go that high, but there are zero bullet trains that do.

betterunix2 8y ago
There is far more to the story than freight companies being uninterested in serving passenger trains. There is also the fact that many of the efficient routes we had a century ago are gone, in some cases even the tracks have been removed; the fact that railroads must compete with heavily subsidized highways and airports; and the fact that we over-regulate passenger rail service (compared to Europe, our trains are much heavier and more expensive to operate). There is also the chronic under-investment in local public transit throughout the country, which makes trains less convenient in the numerous medium-sized cities that exist between major metropolitan areas. Amtrak also inherited "deferred maintenance" at its various stations and on the Northeast Corridor, and they are still trying to dig out of that hole (the fact that their funding is approved annually makes some of the larger projects difficult to plan).

783629gasd 8y ago

A Republican actually created Amtrak, in case you didn't know.

betterunix2 8y ago
With the intention of the whole project failing: http://www.railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=164320 http://www.railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=164320
jwhitlark 8y ago
The Republican party used to have a brain, soul and guts, even if it was wrong on a number of issues. Now it's just mouth and a bad attitude. Both Lincoln and Reagan would be disappointed.