The Left is enamored of Europe and wants more money more money more money for public transportation. What the domestic Left lacks is the kind of identification of the nation with its public transportation which you get in, let's say, France, where an accident or a lack of efficiency or any hint of squalor on Le Grand Train Vitesse is seen as a national disgrace. What that means is that the French bureaucracy charged with managing Le GTV has ZERO tolerance for shoddiness of any sort in the running of the Nation's Pride. There is no such élan here and never will be, not among our disgraceful "public servants."
I like public transportation. I was so impressed with the train system in Switzerland during my one visit many years ago. Those people can dig a hole thru anything. Sadly, we didn't invest in mass-transit when we could afford it. I agree ricpic. Our public servants don't take pride. It's all graft now.
Now - everything is too costly and corrupt to build. so we mock it as a train or a bridge to nowhere. Which is what it will be... because it's all a shovel ready tax dollar train to nowhere.
Where I live, they spend endless millions on endless studies of the I-70 corridor, and nothing ever happens.
The Northeast is where Amtrak is profitable, so that effectively "subsidizes" the rest. That's the only part where they need it, along with the West coast, and where they can really use upgrades to a decent, modern technology. Magnetic levitation tracks in Japan, France (and now CHINA! - Connies love anything China does) can now get up to 400 mph in experimental tracks, and something just shy of 300 mph practically. It makes a lot of sense.
So berate Matthews all you want. The point is that with mag-lev and other substantial high speed designs, you can't have turns that take you down to 50 mph every few miles. Or, I suppose you can, but not frequently, not without fucking up the quality of the route generally. But that's the way it is here. A lot of glitches fucking up the whole thing so that everyone gets their input into how to derail (no pun intended) the project as a whole. And sticking with as many old/existing infrastructure as possible just doesn't cut it. It's an excuse for heel-dragging.
Well A.J., it's a lot better than claiming that being an uninterested ignoramus on everything is the way to go, like you do.
Tell me which other subjects I should avoid discussing, just so that I can prevent myself from insulting your lack of intelligence - ahead of time. Thanks.
For a fraction of the investment you could improve air travel technology and infrastructure. Who the hell wants to go 300mph through trees, rocks, buildings and people, while every single foot of travel your life is at the mercy of any terrorist, stupid kid, or nutjob along the way with a derailment fantasy.
Rail is 19th century tech and high speed rail is like building wagons pulled by super shiny robot horses just because we can. Get up to speed. With the same or less investment we could make air travel that is substantially faster, infinitely safer, and both those things are already true at the start of the process. Trains are just dumb. It's a myopic obsession.
Sorry, Chrissy, there's a lot of stuff there you really can't go through. You have to go around.
But keep saying stuff like that. MSLSD may spare Ed Schultz and ax you.
Rhythm and Balls said...
So berate Matthews all you want. The point is that with mag-lev and other substantial high speed designs, you can't have turns that take you down to 50 mph every few miles.
Just what the Democrat-dominated Northeast needs, a railroad to nowhere like Moonbeam wants.
Isn't a levitated train just an airplane that foolishly flies 1 inch above the deadly terrain, requiring it to make turns, go over or under rock, buy up property, and permanently scar and disrupt the environment for thousands of miles.
With air travel routes can be changed as the population and demand moves. If a particular route is no longer useful, it can be redirected for almost zero cost immediately. No scars left behind on Gaia's face like an old hipster's tattoos, which also seemed like a cool idea at the time.
What happens to all this infrastructure when rail becomes obsolete, or is that impossible?
For a fraction of the investment you could improve air travel technology and infrastructure.
Watch, as a CEO makes the dunderheaded mistake of confusing separate customer bases. He should stick to his own industry, whatever that is.
Who the hell wants to go 300mph..
Lots of people do.
..every single foot of travel your life is at the mercy of any terrorist..
You're a riot. Train is much safer than air travel. And no 1 to 2-hour pre board check-in is a plus, also. As are no long layovers. Get out of your fucking private jet for a minute and wake up and smell the limitations of air travel.
Rail is 19th century tech and high speed rail is like building wagons pulled by super shiny robot horses just because we can.
Right. Magnetic levitation is 19th century tech.
Get up to speed.
Build your own 300 mph mode of ground transportation, then.
And ed - if you say things that ignorant at a job interview, (or business meeting, I forgot that all Republicans are wanna-be pretend entrepreneurs), you shouldn't say such stupid things like that. It will totally tank the deal. Just don't do it. Don't be a dumbass.
I know that, for a guy like you, that's almost impossible, but at least try to hold your tongue and shut your face. It might save you.
Hey Shmedrick, Why do you avoid addressing the points of my arguments? You do have counter arguments don't you? Ad hominem attacks on someone you never met, or even know anything about, is pretty lame. It's like you never really thought about any of these these things. Try that, then dig through your talking points and look for one that adds something substantive. You do want to convince someone, don't you?
Ad hominem attacks on someone you never met, or even know anything about, is pretty lame. It's like you never really thought about any of these these things.
The way you lambaste an anxious market for high-speed rail, without ever meeting them or knowing anything about them, is also pretty lame. You can "think" as much as you want, but your market research on this is absolute shit, and obviously just substituted with your political talking points.
Trains are just dumb. It's a myopic obsession.
Getting from point A to point B is not a myopic obsession. It's how commerce happens and how life happens.
We might as well say that curing cancer, let alone liver cancer, is a myopic obsession. Better to just prevent it when you can, and fuck the market for those who claim they need it treated. Let them suffer and cut off NCI and NIH funding for all the basic research that the industry's taken from to find effective treatments for it, just like we should do to everyone whose lives and livelihoods in a heavily populated region are improved dramatically by diversifying and improving the transit options between them.
I used to take the commuter train down to San Diego and back. Actually, I took my bike on board and made the connections to work and to home that way--that's how tree-hugging I was.
There is this stretch of trackage along the route which passes through the community of Del Mar. The tracks hug the shore and there isn't room for double tracks. A couple of wealthy homoaners who own property there have blocked expansion projects for decades. Basically, they bought Del Mar property back in the day and now they want the trains gone completely because they want La Jolla property values. I say fuck them. It's always a couple of loud individuals wrecking things.
Back "on track"....I'm sure that straightening the lines on the east coast (getting rid of curves) would require endless eminent domain actions along with concomitant gold-digging and rent-seeking by individuals looking out for themselves.
Oceanside is actually a great commuter rail hub. It's the northern most stop for the San Diego commuter rails going south and east; it's also the southern most stop on the L.A. commuter train lines going north. Amtrak also stops here. The commuter trains all allow bikes on board. Amtrak is faster (fewer stops) and more expensive, but, they serve beer on board. My only gripe is that Amtrack doesn't allow pets (even small dogs) -- not even in cages in separate cars. This rule has foiled many-a-weekend jaunts up north to Hollywood where we have family.
I think that Ritmo had a point up there... sort of like April's point...
We could have upgraded trains or super fast commuter routes or this or that but everyone is trying to get their own way. There's no one to say that the decision is made and this is it, go forth and build something amazing and huge and the people will rejoice!
Won't happen. It's not that we don't have TRAINS... it's that we don't have nuclear plants, distributed thorium municipal power centers, springing up all over, we don't have massive desalination projects because no one can decide and everyone wants perfection or nothing, and no one will say "tough sh*t, sit down and like it, bozo, we're going to have a fleet of refurbed desalination tankers and you and your fussbutton friends and suck it", we're taking our dams *down*. But now and then people will want something like trains... not because they're gleaming testaments to the future and progress, but because they're quaint.
Somehow.
And also, if we can't build an oil pipeline because *scary*... we need to move oil on trains. Because trains are fun... like Thomas the Tank Engine... and old fashioned... with their little puff-puff-puff... makes people think happy thoughts.
We've got a couple commuter trains in New Mexico. Go from Albuquerque to Santa Fe to Socorro.
Thing is really... we need to do our urban planning different if we want to make better use of mass-transit or buses or anything. We like things spread out... SAFE... like, your work place can't be near your home, isn't near schools, and can't be by your shopping because we making shopping be in it's own "commercial" zone, and your work be in it's own "industrial" zone and there are schools in your "residential" zone, but not high school. Get a "food desert" because of zoning and fees... can't just open up a little shop on the corner.
Spent part of this week in Vallejo, California in the "historic" part of town... my brother lives in his wife's grandfather's old home... grandpa also owned a store on the corner of the same block. Had a second house there with a shop on the ground floor. Try building that now, next to your neighbor's in their houses. Just try.
Funny, I don't feed "off stride", whatever that means.
But I'm sure that if anyone knows what it's like to be off stride it's a guy like AJ, who waddles when he walks and occasionally has trouble picking his massive girth off the floor after he tumbles to a Chris Christie-like spill.
That's what happens when one's width surpasses one's height.
You'd actually think a guy like AJ would prefer rail to flight -- especially with all the increased user fees and obesity restrictions and double seat requirements a guy like him would be putting up with. Flying has not gotten any easier for the 300 pounders and up crowd.
Oh well. At least he can live vicariously though others, while he jerks himself off, like a drunken cheerleader, to Bag O's comments. Being able to do that is the most excitement he's gotten in decades.
It would actually be pretty easy to get AJ on a train. Just put an all-you-can-eat buffet-style snack bar on every other car and let him have at it. Construct rail stops along the way every ten miles stocked with nachos, corn chips, salsa, cheese, Big Macs, waffles, Shamrock Shakes, crab cakes, lobster rolls, bacon bits, cheesesteaks, iceberg lettuce, french fries, ice cream, donuts, and fried chicken.
We've government-ed our way to paralysis and waste. Shovel ready stimulus to nowhere. What? you believed us?
"It is an embarrassment, okay. And then when something like this happens, it is a tragic reminder, whether it’s human error or whatever, of where we are in our train travel and what that says about our larger infrastructure. But there are those in the Congress, who say wait a minute, Amtrak is poorly run, poorly managed, and the investments and the billions that we’ve put in in the past have been poorly spent. What do you say to taxpayers and to that? --Some guy named Sesno
There’s this obsession, particularly on the East Coast, with moving lots of Americans around by train. The sophisticated Europeans do that, we should too. There’s so much know-nothingism at work here. In America we move stuff (i.e., freight) by rail and people by road (and plane). In Europe they do it the other way around. America’s freight rail system is the best in the world (which is why Warren Buffett keeps investing in it). The reasons for this arrangement have to do with population density, geography, etc. I’m not saying our passenger-rail system couldn’t be better, particularly in the Northeast. But this idea that we’re falling behind China on infrastructure is ridiculous. Just because the Morning Joe crowd doesn’t care about, or see, the freight rail system, doesn’t mean we should obviously blow it up to turn it into a passenger rail system.
More to the point, we have twice as much track in the U.S. as they do in China. China has four times our population, give or take, and hundreds of millions of people in abject poverty. They are awash in cash. They subscribe to a philosophy of massive state planning of the economy. Why are we surprised, never mind jealous, of them? We already have a lot of infrastructure. They don’t. Last I checked, we have eleven times more airports.
And please, anybody can admire the Swiss train system, but keep in mind that the Swiss economy is basically one of entitled native Swiss lording over a large second-class citizenry. The "Swiss-model" is what we're headed for.
IOW, Ritmo has no rebuttal, so he just screams his usual vague insults.
BTW, I rode public transit around the Philadelphia area going to school and such for many years and for 4 years when I worked for the IRS, so I probably know a lot more about the experience than he does.
PS I don't see too many people flocking to his sarc wise /sarc counsel.
In fact, the next will be the first.
PPS Nowhere, more accurately is anywhere Ritmo happens to be at any given moment.
And you could get ed to ride the train by putting an unemployment office in it, and a sofa in his own car. He'd feel right at home!
Bag-O' could be enticed by putting a car full of elementary science experiments on it. It would be just like his Saturdays at the local children's science museum.
I do understand that, Chickl. I once knew a couple who moved here from Switzerland. They "escaped" it for greener pastures of a freer America. They didn't like all the over-bearing social engineering and the super high cost of living and punitive taxation. They felt "suffocated". (to use their words)
Still, the Swiss rail system (which is partially private btw) is amazing. It's a tiny country filled with sharp pointy mountains and they turned it into swiss cheese. Get it - swiss cheese. ;-/ Glorious swiss cheese.
Amtrak has about 24,000,000 rider trips a year. Taxpayers contribute about $50 to every trip.
Assuming the average rider does a round trip, that translates to about 12,000,000 users per year, or 1,000,000 per month or 50,000 a day.That is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
And the average Amtrak user is a high income person. The discerning traveler, who is watching his pennies, can't afford to ride on Amtrak and opts instead for on of the intercity bus lines like Bolt.
You guys are a gas. Whether or not we become "more" like Europe or Switzerland has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with population.
If our population grows to become as great as theirs per square mile, then we will need to emulate their infrastructure and policy goals. That's just the way it is.
Conservatives seem to want this, but without the necessary follow-up.
Amtrak stats are meaningless unless you confine them to everything between Boston and DC. Other than that, the cons are right. They can take desolate flyover-land and leave it to languish. That's fine. But the Northeast makes great use of it, needs it, and benefits greatly from improvements to it. AJ knows this, as infrequently as he gets his fat buns out of his SUV in the suburbs and looks around to notice it.
"There’s this obsession, particularly on the East Coast, with moving lots of Americans around by train. The sophisticated Europeans do that, we should too. There’s so much know-nothingism at work here. In America we move stuff (i.e., freight) by rail and people by road (and plane). In Europe they do it the other way around. America’s freight rail system is the best in the world (which is why Warren Buffett keeps investing in it). The reasons for this arrangement have to do with population density, geography, etc. I’m not saying our passenger-rail system couldn’t be better, particularly in the Northeast. But this idea that we’re falling behind China on infrastructure is ridiculous. Just because the Morning Joe crowd doesn’t care about, or see, the freight rail system, doesn’t mean we should obviously blow it up to turn it into a passenger rail system.
More to the point, we have twice as much track in the U.S. as they do in China. China has four times our population, give or take, and hundreds of millions of people in abject poverty. They are awash in cash. They subscribe to a philosophy of massive state planning of the economy. Why are we surprised, never mind jealous, of them? We already have a lot of infrastructure. They don’t. Last I checked, we have eleven times more airports."
The discerning traveler, who is watching his pennies, can't afford to ride on Amtrak and opts instead for on of the intercity bus lines like Bolt.
Oceanside, home to Camp Pendleton, also has a thriving bus terminal. But these days, many enlisted are flying just like everybody else. No wonder there's perennial talk of building a major airport here.
I have two young relatives who lived and studied in NYC. To get to and from Philly for holidays etc Amtrak was out of the question economically. They used the Chinatown bus services prior to Bolt etc going online. $10 to go from Philly to NYC or back.
So Amtrak, IMHO, should stand on its own two feet financially- it should not get more taxpayer money.
Blah blah blah Ritmo, as you know, businesses can cook the books and allocate costs arbitrarily, so I am skeptical Amtrak makes money on any of its lines.
And please stfu until you address Bago's excellent arguments.
Lets get real. Ed Rendell, Obozo and her Thighness Queen Money-grubber couldn't build a Swiss rail system even if they had public support, a democrat controlled congress, a democrat controlled senate and a sure fire way to tax every US citizen at 80% and every evil rethuglican at 100%. (new ultra fair IRS law)
**with special tax exemptions for Clinton foundation donors**
In our modern corrupt political era, all that money would be wasted. Well, not according to ABC news.
Hey Fallin' out of the chair Christie AJ - as I said Baggie never made any arguments, just opinions and assertions, so until he provides any actual evidence of anything there's nothing to address. But since you're just like Chris CHristie (in looks and morals) and would orchestrate a traffic jam on crucial bridges I don't expect you to appreciate the importance of facts. Talk about cooking books. Lol. There's your hero for you.
You creeps are a blast. Thinking opinions are the same thing as arguments, and need to be addressed as such. Go back to your home-school and demand a refund.
without wanting to Mathews may have stray into what I see as the biggest obstacle to trains as a viable competitive means of moving people. Trains, when compared to planes and buses, are less route change flexible.
If people stop going somewhere... trains keep making the same turns.
So, Bago said Mag Lev trains run an inch off the ground.Isn't that fact?
And he said, at an inch off the ground they would be at a greater risk to collide with something than a plane would? Isn't that a fact?
This falls under the category of too stupid to respond to. They are elevated on a thin layer of air because magnets repel. This cuts down on drag and allows for acceleration to very high speeds. And no, that does not mean they are at "great" risk for collision. They are prevented from leaving the tracks because the tops of the tracks flange outward to secure them in place. They are their own infrastructure and therefore wouldn't be at risk of being run at twice the recommended speed as your conductor in Frankfort was going due to the fact that it was older infrastructure upon which faster trains could travel.
Bag's comment wasn't worth responding to because there was nothing controversial or provocative about it. It's a basic fact.
You can even look it up. If you weren't afraid of your brain exploding and oozing out of your skull due to having actually learned an interesting fact or two.
What is wrong with you? You are seriously more scared than a rabbit of learning anything new or understanding a new technology. Are you sure your parents came from coal country? You strike me as someone descended from the bushmen tribes in The Gods Must Be Crazy, getting all spooked out over a Coca Cola bottle that fell from an airplane.
And he said, at an inch off the ground they would be at a greater risk to collide with something than a plane would? Isn't that a fact?
It's about as much a "fact" as saying that it's a "fact" that because the moon is light in color, it must be made of green cheese.
The pols are right. You guys really are afraid of your own shadows. Your world views and politics are almost completely driven by a paranoia over all the new things in the world that, despite being obviously and easily explicable to a college, grad, you know nothing about, and make fearsome stories about that would rival those told by Cargo Cults.
You all must please forgive me for speaking so harshly to AJ. I just seriously never realized exactly how great his fear of the modern world really was. I guess if I knew that little and feared that much, my reactions would be as strange as his.
I do hope he gets out more and tries and makes an effort at understanding the workings of all the planes, trains, and automobiles that make up life in the modern world and in a modern economy. He may end up even liking what he finds out.
I didn't know Britain had any maglev, but apparently it was an old system that was closed down in 1995. Glad to hear it was a smooth ride - that seems to be the experience it creates. A drag-less ride has huge advantages in multiple ways - as new technologies often do.
I really don't understand AJ's fear of it. The science behind it is pretty basic, and easily GOOGLEABLE.
It's not that we don't have TRAINS... it's that we don't have nuclear plants, distributed thorium municipal power centers, springing up all over, we don't have massive desalination projects because no one can decide and everyone wants perfection or nothing,...
My mistake. I thought Bago made some great arguments vs. Ritmo's plea for more and faster trains. But I guess Ritmo is just too dumb & doctrinaire to see his points.
But I guess Ritmo is just too dumb & doctrinaire to see his points.
I guess we must be using the word "see" differently. What I saw were assertions unsubstantiated by evidence. But apparently, when chicken little (not our Chickelit) squawks about the sky falling out, you take that to be a "fact" or an "argument". Just be aware that most educated, rational people don't find propagandistic scaremongering to be factual or sound argument.
There is nothing about using air instead of metal between you and a track that makes it more dangerous. Unless you're afraid of air, or just of air travel. But then that's an idiotic argument to use if you're going to say that airplanes are safer.
Seriously, I didn't realize you were such a fraidy-cat of magnets and air, AJ. DId you realize these things are all around you, every day? AIr and magnets won't kill you. Although for evolution's sake, it might be better for humanity if they did. I mean, it's not like some people can't drown in a bathtub.
Your reaction to maglev is like how the Ewoks of Endor responded to technology, before they started worshipping C-3PO like a god. You really do have this reaction of cowering in fear of anything different. It's kind of sad, but kind of funny. As I said, most children aren't as afraid of new things as you are.
Isn't a levitated train just an airplane that foolishly flies 1 inch above the deadly terrain, requiring it to make turns, go over or under rock, buy up property, and permanently scar and disrupt the environment for thousands of miles.
Buying up property caught my eye. The government would have to find a way around that. Otherwise, that alone kills it.
What a buffoon. AIrports and highways also require property. Rail lines already exist. But there's no accounting for right-wing stupidity. Now the existence of linear space makes something evil. There's no end to it.
Rail is a great way to see the countryside from the ground that it actually exists on, instead of divvied up into the ugly agricultural squares and circles that carve up flyover land.
It also doesn't cause massive sheets of continental ice to fall off of the polar caps, ruin the oceans, and cause permanent droughts to the largest agricultural region of the U.S.
But taking up linear property space is much worse than all these things.
Keep up the sense of proportion, April. It's scaring AJ but unhinged reactions of all sorts pretty much define your politics.
Nobody said rail was evil. Why do you do that? It's like you're uneducated or something. Your choice of words in your "arguments" (or lame ass opinions) make you seem desperate.
"It also doesn't cause massive sheets of continental ice to fall off of the polar caps, ruin the oceans, and cause permanent droughts to the largest agricultural region of the U.S."
God , you are such a brainwashed maroon. And now you jumped the shark.
I'm all for some public transportation. When and where it makes sense.
I was watching our local biased mainstream media news a while back. To my surprise, they actually accomplished some curious investigative reporting.
A new Light-Rail line recently opened running down the length of 6th Avenue - starting in Golden and ending in Denver. Great. cheers. All that. The reporter calculated the cost comparison between taking the Light Rail Train V driving your own car. Turns out, driving your own car down 6th avenue is much much cheaper.
God , you are such a brainwashed maroon. And now you jumped the shark.
Really, AJ?
But at least I know how magnets work.
And unlike you, I'm not afraid of them!
But a guy who quivers in fear, hiding under his bed, so that the mean scary magnets (and air that they float on) don't get him, a guy who is afraid of knowledge and people who pursue it, this guy is calling others shark-jumping "maroons".
AJ, it doesn't end there. If we're not careful, air hockey tables might get out of hand, also.
We need to ban the use of air hockey tables, right AJ?
April, you're being more balanced. But if you read "AJ Lynch's" gurgles, you'll see that he actually believes technology based on magnets and a layer of air are apocalyptically unsafe.
He believes that Bag O' (whose "expertise" may or may not be in anything having to do with transportation, let alone maglev technology), told him so.
April - In Toronto, they found the light rail trolley routes are slow and wasteful and traffic bottlenecks, and as Bago stated, the existing routes are kinda hard to just pick up and re-locate.
I don't have anything against mass transit if it is economically competitive with other types of transit [i.e. car, bike, walking, horseback, bus lines, etc]
R&B wrote: Rail is a great way to see the countryside from the ground that it actually exists on, instead of divvied up into the ugly agricultural squares and circles that carve up flyover land.
I don't have anything against mass transit if it is economically competitive with other types of transit [i.e. car, bike, walking, horseback, bus lines, etc]
Problem is, you dill rods cook the books endlessly on those numbers, also.
There is no alternative for regional or city-to-city transport of less than 300 miles that's faster than cars and less inconvenient than checking in and clearing security with the full body-image scans at Airborne Terrorism Central. Period. That's why through the Northeast, it makes money.
There's no "books cooked" on that stat. Throughout the northeast (and if they did it on the West coast) it would continue to make money.
But if it didn't, we could just disband it the same way we do all other subsidized, government-managed enterprises, like police forces, etc.
For instance, for $1.2 Billion a year, the taxpayers could buy 30,000 vans at $40K each and let people use them to drive whereever they want. So shut down Amtrak and support the American auto industry by buying 30,000 vans a year for the 50,000 daily Amtrak commuters to use instead of the train.
Seems to me air travel should be part of our mass-transit solution.
It's not at all crazy to object to the idea that we cannot afford to keep pouring money into a losing proposition like Amtrak. It's less about the train itself, anyway. It's really about our inability to not waste money.
Look at the new VA Hospital here as an example. The will to do it is there, but corruption and waste win the day. The thing is millions upon millions over-budget and still not finished.
It's not idea that is the problem- ideas can be debated - it is truly that we can no longer do anything without waste, shovel ready bogus promises and corruption.
Many years ago now, then Governor Owens(R) successfully expanded and modernized I-25 in the south Denver corridor. It was under budget and finished ahead of schedule. It is also a pleasing stretch to drive with new bridges. Great job. All done with an R governor. oh noez! how that be? He so supidz.
Our current governor, Hickenlooper, is ruling over a mess on Highway 36. It is taking forever, it is ugly, and we had to sell the actual road to some country in South America. yeah. and it will now be a toll road. buggers to that.
So billions of dollars to subsidize those who cannot afford a car, and it costs the person taking the ride 4+ bucks each way... each day. That's 8 bucks per day. that's 40 bucks a week. All extracted from the poor guy who cannot afford a car - or the greeny perv who thinks his decision is saving the planet.
April - Ritmo thinks only his ideological opponents cook the books so he insinuated your analyst was dishonest or incompetent or both and failed to include the cost of the car in his analysis.
AJ - Yeah the local democrat news guy must be wrong.
The "news" guy just did the basic math. For those who want to ditch their car and take the light-rail as an alternative, it will actually cost more. That's all.
Plenty of people are OK with it, because green. or because mass-transit.
I'm not so sure that line was a good idea. They are installing a line from downtown Denver to the airport. I will be curious how the math works out on that one.
Ok old windmills are worse than old cars. If it's new or innovative and helpful and not subsidized by the consumer spending 20k on it (plus their own maintenance) then it's bad. You guys are hard to keep up with but it sounds like those are the basic rules for con infrastructure, so I'll try to keep them in mind.
Who said any of this? Nobody who has ever flown will ever argue or disagree that it isn't a royal pain. But when air travel goes smoothly,. you can get from Boston to London is about 8 hours. LA to NY City in about 6 hours.
Who said any of this? Nobody who has ever flown will ever argue or disagree that it isn't a royal pain. But when air travel goes smoothly,. you can get from Boston to London is about 8 hours. LA to NY City in about 6 hours.
Yeah -- that sucks man!
If you changed your name to "wall", then maybe so. Because rail connecting LA and NY or Boston to London is the height of retardation. All of my comments made it clear that I'm talking about city-to-city or regional travel of 300 miles or less. That's what's needed and that's where it makes the most sense.
What's with these all-or-nothing ultimatums on the part of you guys? Is that why you don't understand economics? It's about trade-offs for specific needs, not replacing every option.
Yeah, and they're one of the biggest and nastiest and most aggressive of the very consolidated bunch.
Listen, alternatives are needed yesterday. Mandating air travel as the only quick way to go from Boston to DC or Pittsburgh to Chicago (or any of the other regional trip) is the height of stupidity.
Now he is an economics expert in addition to engineering and physics. I suggest you learn a bit more about human psychology before you try and force your librul psychoses on the rest of us.
Now he is an economics expert in addition to engineering and physics. I suggest you learn a bit more about human psychology before you try and force your librul psychoses on the rest of us.
I suggest you even learn what a book is and how to open it before you rattle off all the fields upon which you will not tolerate any thought.
Seriously, this guy's afraid of air, magnets and basically everything but rattlesnakes, and he's talking about what other people haven't bothered to learn about.
I suggest you learn a bit more about human psychology before you try and force your librul psychoses on the rest of us.
The psychology of right-wing anxiety-riddled sociopaths like AJ Lynch is not conventional psychology, so it doesn't apply. Normal psychology is not that hard to know something about.
But I still have managed to learn something about it.
Seriously, you're like Tony Soprano. A fat, uneducated sociopath, subject to panic attacks. Do the similarities ever end?
I would love perfectly smooth safe forms of transport. Heck - what we all really want is the molecule beam-me-up transfer system so we don't even continue this tedious conversation.
It's not about the train. We no longer have the ability to do it. Too much waste and fraud.
Why aren't the tracks banked at the curve so that trains can fly around them at 100 MPH or higher? Eh? That would be so completely ace.
If trains went faster than cars then the whole thing would be worth it and lot more fun passing up all those schlubs in their cars. But no. They're slower. You see cars passing you up and that takes the fun right out of it. The whole time you're thinking, I could be in my car and going fast then parking right there, no other connections at all.
In Denver they don't even check if you paid. I think it's the honor system. I rode it, like five times, I think, and they never checked. Would you like to see one of the rides?
Why do Democrats insist on forcing everyone else to live pages straight out of Atlas Shrugged then laugh and giggle and ridicule any such comparison, even as they live the roles of characters so clearly perceived and delineated by Rand in that book? Same as their acceptance of criminality I suppose, because they can't help it.
Late one afternoon on our honeymoon on the big island, we decided, on a lark, to drive down to South Point. My judgement of the distance was faulty and the timing proved to be a mistake.
We headed down the narrow two lane road that seemed to go on forever into the middle of nowhere. On the way it got dark, really dark. Don't remember if it was overcast or just moonless, but we couldn't see much of anything beyond the headlights and we seemed to be the only people on the road. We were in a rental Camero convertible with the top down.
This was before we had cell phones and, to tell you the truth, it was a little spooky. Then, in the dim light, coming up on the right we could vaguely see, near the side of the road, a dozen or more of these gigantic, alien-looking windmills. There seemed to be others off in the darkness. Some of them were turning and making a deep whoosh-whoosh noise. You could feel it. Later I learned that this was the Kamaoa Wind Farm part way into its eventual shut-down.
We stopped to gawk, turned off the headlights, and got out of the car. The spookiness soon evolved to creepiness, and we jointly decided to continue our trek south.
Soon we ran out of road and were driving on dirt. Found a boat repair place that was deserted and finally we gave up and headed home with a sense of failure and relief.
@ chip Why do Democrats insist on forcing everyone else to live pages straight out of Atlas Shrugged then laugh and giggle and ridicule any such comparison, even as they live the roles of characters so clearly perceived and delineated by Rand in that book?
PTC would have prevented this one but your "citizen reporter" neglected to review the fact that rail upgrades are highly desired and can be used to re-route tracks so that no curves this steep, with a 50 mph limit, would have been necessary.
Oh, and contrary to the media’s “Amtrak fan fiction,” as Sean Davis calls it, Congress just authorized $1.4 billion in new subsidies to Amtrak less than five months ago. So there goes that narrative.
This is one sorry pathetic thread (reminiscent of another blog of note)...however, for those who think "straightening" rail rights of way would be a solution in urban areas, let me know how you feel if they take your house and home via eminent domain. Here where I live we've got a few thousand folks who have an opinion on that...they used to live in what is now called "Poletown." BTW, all y'all bailed that facility out in the last crash in 2008...and you will again when the next crash occurs. Enjoy.
Wow! All that and not a single explanation of why it makes sense to pull planes down from the sky, slow them down and then make them fly an inch off the ground through the countryside on extremely expensive environmentally disruptive and scaring infrastructure you don't need to build at all. It almost sounds like spending money and fucking up the environment is the real objective. That's not nice.
@Rabel: I like that song (who doesn't). Though immortalized by Arlo Guthrie, it was written by Steve Goodman. I mentioned that once and Goodman's biographer "tracked" me down in the comments: link
bagoh20 ... actually you make a very good point. I've worked on railroad equipment and track systems...it is a tedious 24/7 proposition, hell just maintaining gauge at 58.5 inches is a never ending chore. Fail just that simple but arduous chore and trains go off the tracks. Railways in most places always disrupt a country side or a neighborhood. Always.
Funny thing is I used to really like rail transportation before the advent of aircraft going everywhere. Today it is far less pleasant....the feds and my city just built a big fancy new Amtrak station (5 times bigger than the previous one, a literal whistle stop, on the line Detroit to Chicago)....to provide service to Chicago that takes 9 hours plus, more than double the time it takes to drive via I-94 Freeway...triple the time it takes to fly from DTW to Chicago Midway, including the parking and boarding hassle time. Something is "wack" in the planning there...especially since the fed money went away last month when building finished, and the operation cost is going to be city funded.
I fail to see how this improves anything since Eisenhower mandated the nation's express way system. Connections to places west are abysmal ... getting to Boseman, Montana is nearly an impossible array of stops and train changes...again taking as much time or more than just driving, and far far more than flying DTW to BZN. Go figure.
They don't believe in doing cost/benefit analysis to justify a project. The feds write a check that must be spent on X , Y or Z type projects and no one considers the operating costs after the project is built. Of if they do, it is a kinda "If We Build It The Passengers Will Come With Their Money."
Wow! All that and not a single explanation of why it makes sense to pull planes down from the sky…
No one ever said anything about "pulling planes down from the sky," you malignant liar. It almost makes someone have to drink to talk with you natural winos. Not that I did or would, but I can see why you'd get that impression given the sort of stupor-induced nonsense I have to respond to.
...environmentally disruptive and scaring infrastructure…
A guy ignorant enough to actively deny the role of a planet's own atmosphere in regulating its climate has no business opining on what's "environmentally disruptive".
We like trains because... trains. Because Thomas the Tank Engine. They're quaint and homey, even the gleaming supersonic maglev ultra supersonic sort. In our minds they occupy a space that makes us feel all warm and cuddly. Puff-puff-puff. Ritmo can pretend not to understand what I'm talking about, but that just makes him look dumb. He can pretend not to understand what Bagoh is saying about slowing planes down and making them fly one inch off the ground, but that just makes him look dumb.
Do you know what trains are? They're ethernet cable run through a house. Great stuff. For about a 5 year window until someone just invented a wireless hub for home networks.
Imagine someone, today, gushing on about how they're going to wire their whole house for a computer network.
Well, if anyone is more concerned with looks than with substance, Synova - it's your crew.
Stop being a retard. These are very concrete advantages:
1. No wasted one-hour pre-board check-in. 2. No too uncomfortable for anyone (even AJ) 10 inch horizontal seat restriction. (And why would anyone refuse to believe that a system is over-taxed when they pack people in like sardines like that? I guess conservatives just like being treated like the human cargo on the transport trains to Auschwitz). 3. No full image body scans or groping. 4. No total travel times for medium trips (<450 miles) that take longer to get from destination to destination than they need to. 5. More travel options are always better, and promote competition. That is, unless you're a Republican corporatist slave who prefers to be dictated to by the United/US Scareways oligopoly on what's what.
Anyone who can't understand all those advantages is either a blind corporatist shill or a weed firmly planted in their backwater province, with little understanding of the advantages of travel.
Most major cities on the East coast are less than 300 miles from each other. No one who lives there (as opposed to the deserted flyover land you live in) is ignorant of the advantages afforded by the rail infrastructure that connects them.
By all means, those of you who live in deserted islands of backwardness have every right to wall yourself off from as many land-based connections to the next deserted island as you like. You don't have what it takes for the smoother commerce and tourism advantaged by rail to make a difference for you, anyway, as less people want to live there, less tourists visit there, and less companies do business there.
But this incident didn't take place in Arizona. So butt the fuck out and allow the civilized people to improve and upgrade the networks that work for them as they like.
The rest of you desert-dwellers are free to live like Arabs.
In our minds they occupy a space that makes us feel all warm and cuddly.
I suppose what makes Synova feel "all warm and cuddly" is:
1. Being body-image scanned and/or groped and molested by TSA. 2. Being packed buttcheek-to-sweaty buttcheek in minimal seat space next to a few fatties with large butt skin-folds draping down into her lap. 3. Wasting an extra hour needed to be at the airport. 4. Taking the most terrorism-prone mode of transportation possible. 5. Paying extra to check-in the luggage you want to take with you. 6. Decreasing options in the U.S. travel market and making sure the two worst airlines (is it a coincidence that they're American companies?) control the industry.
Hope you're feeling all "warm and cuddly" about all that, Synova. And if you're not, the adjacent, obese passenger has a nice big flap of warm, sweaty butt-cheek to douse you with.
It's obvious that, not only have you never ridden a train, you actually don't know anything about them apart from what a child growing up in 1950 learned about them. Further, you make up a fantasy whereby the experience of boarding and riding one has anything to do with what's been made a regular part of plane travel.
Stop. You are embarrassing yourself.
I understand that, for the right-wing paranoia-propaganda machine to work, outlandish theories must be created and maintained. But please, body scanners for boarding trains? They don't even have the infrastructure for scanning people and luggage in the lines where people board. Nor will they. Ever.
Why can't you just stick to the usual machinations? These stories about applying plane restrictions to train travel are so desperate, a normal person would have to read what you wrote about them to believe them.
I am astounded by how desperate you are. You would seriously say the sky is yellow at this point in order to get your political point scored.
This explains Republicanism. Desperation so acute that no fantasy is too outlandish to make-up to distract from it.
There is no functional reason that a train is roomy and pleasant and a plane is cramped and has you walk past a TSA nudie machine.
The cattle-car experience is to get as many warm bodies on the transport as possible. Be it an airplane or a subway or the wonderful wonderful trains that dart you around Japan. The term "cattle car" is a train term, after all.
You say that there will never be annoying security and delays to get you on a train. Ever.
You can't explain why not, ever. You just say so. Particularly if there are all these super fast (ie., they don't *stop* every little bit) trains that go super fast for long distances. Some one blows one up and *shazam*... nudie scanners and lines. They add some cars for poor people with discount tickets and *shazam*, cattle cars.
I'm not saying it would happen, I'm saying that you haven't even tried to bother to explain why it wouldn't. Your idea of argument is "it just won't, dummy, republican, anti-science, idiot" and apparently the only reason it won't is because you said so.
You list the downsides of air travel as if those things aren't artificial relics of political paranoia and then expect this to be taken as thoughtful?
What the hell is a "functional reason"? I'm talking about REALITY. Reality exists whether you can find a reason for it or not, Lady.
That said, there are potentially plausible reasons for why you aren't shoved into a baby seat on a train: 1. Air travel is EXPENSIVE and COSTLY. Fuel costs, security costs, safety costs ALL ADD UP. So the airlines obviously have an interest in packing in as many warm bodies into as many midget-seats as possible.
This will continue until rail or other non-air alternatives become more widespread, as they are along the East coast. In economics this is called "substitutable". Instead of flying or driving from Boston to DC, you take rail. Or a bus. It works and it drives down prices for both travel modes. And incentivizes airlines to make their travel options either more attractive or less nasty. They no longer have to compete on the basis of just being the sole provider of that travel, but for a reason a train ride can't provide. Or, for something else - such as Cathay Pacific does when it offers luxurious sleeping suites, etc.
What the hell is wrong with you? This is basic economics. It shouldn't be difficult to understand; Republicans like to go around pretending that they invented economics.
Disappointing.
As for security, you remind me of Ali G. Man, what a bozo. He interviewed the head of Homeland Security and asked about the danger of trains being hijacked. The guy gave a perplexed response. Hijacking is what made airlines a security threat in the first place. Since trains do not offer terrorists that handy option of being hijacked, there is less of a security threat to them.
So that inconvenience is also decreased. As is the cost associated with it. You might have noticed that TSA's efforts along the Amtrak lines and NJ Transit and SEPTA and METRA and MBTA and BART and ALL THE REST OF THAT are negligible, amounting to a minuscule proportion of what's spent securing air travel.
See? I need to explain all these things to you because you're not aware of them, I suppose. Maybe you've never been to SF, NYC, Boston, DC, Chicago or the many other major cities in this great country where so much of the actual population lives, and where so much of its culture is made, where so much of its commercial activity takes place, where so much livelihood is generated. And that's your choice.
But don't pretend that I'm a bad person for expecting that someone dictating terms on the infrastructure that ACTUALLY SERVES so much of America's population, actually UNDERSTANDS how that infrastructure works.
If you have honest questions, and have never visited these cities, or seen how their transit systems work, what you can do is something called asking a question nicely. If you did that, instead of dispensing with snide comments about shiny train cars and mesmerizing technology, maybe I or anyone else who's familiar with it wouldn't respond negatively.
But you didn't.
And I guess that's just how it goes in America. One person's ignorance is as good as another person's knowledge. And sure, you have the right to that attitude. But don't expect me to respect and respond nicely when that attitude of yours is just as insulting, as well as wrong, and, obviously, a bad approach.
Learn how to live with others. This is their country, also.
R & B ... the only embarrassing thing on this thread is your adamant implication that cramped corridors like the north east, and some fantasy about the west coast, nearly equally cramped, are be all and end all of train travel...and the fly-over folks are loons.
Odd, then,that I agree that train travel in the northeast should be the best it can be, since the relatively short distances between dense municipalities makes airline travel a chore.
I question if you have anything near my experience with airplanes and trains, given I'm one of those 1950's troglodytes who rode both great passenger trains east-west, as well as flew on DC-3's, at an early age....such as age 10 - 15. I loved the trains of that era, but they no longer exist except in the corridors of urban density. There is almost no where I can travel by comfortable trains between Detroit and the rocky mountain west with more hassle than flying, and in most cases today I would be forced to take a bus for a large chunk of the distance to get anywhere in the west. No thank you.
Your belittling of the central part of the USA is bothersome, but it's your opinion, and your right to feel that way. Never mind the contributions the fly-over folks have contributed to the nations welfare including the dense urban centers on the east coast...where I agree that modern efficient train travel is a good idea...that does not mean we "hicks" are bound to the concept over a much wider area.
These days I'm almost inclined to just drive my truck, and skip both air and rail travel, both suck, and though it takes longer and costs more, I'll be seeing more of the countryside than by other travel means. I consider that, today, a virtue. In my dotage I am planning to revert to the "road trips" of my impoverished college days, just for the fun of it, and skip being shunted to obscure locales by trains or herded like cattle on aircraft.
I've been around the world, so to speak, and enjoyed trains where they served a purpose and weren't a hassle, even if that meant sharing economy class with sundry sheep, pigs, chickens and their tenders, which I've done many times.
As I said earlier, you can paint your wagon any color you wish, but it won't make it pretty....especially if it requires herky-jerk schedules and more stops than a Conestoga wagon.
As sometimes happens, you're missing the point, Dog. Regional travel infrastructure is regional. As long as you're not telling the Acela what it should do, I have no problem with how you want to get to and from Detroit. Although, as you'll see in my comment, I did point out that Chicago's METRA does a good job of providing modern rail, as well. Or, at least it did the last time I was on it.
R & B ... sorry, I am NOT missing the point. I responded to what you wrote and how you wrote it. That you cannot see that is out of my control.
You seem satisfied with good rail service in the NE corridor, and dang the rest of us. Part of the problem you seem to cite then ignore is the idea of "regional" service in enclaves. Translation: "uncoordinated." One of my best ever rail experiences was Detroit to Chicago to St Louis and then to Colorado Springs as an unaccompanied kid of 13. It was coordinated and linked seamlessly, with easy changes at the cities I cite, as it should be....today that is not the case. If you are satisfied with that, so be it.
179 comments:
Leftists love their trains until they have to go around a bend.
If you pay attention, you will notice that all these "unexpected" disasters happen when turning to the left.
But, back to the subject of trains: Always sit in the last car.
It's not fair that planes get to fly straight...
Wait, planes are homophobic?
The Left is enamored of Europe and wants more money more money more money for public transportation. What the domestic Left lacks is the kind of identification of the nation with its public transportation which you get in, let's say, France, where an accident or a lack of efficiency or any hint of squalor on Le Grand Train Vitesse is seen as a national disgrace. What that means is that the French bureaucracy charged with managing Le GTV has ZERO tolerance for shoddiness of any sort in the running of the Nation's Pride. There is no such élan here and never will be, not among our disgraceful "public servants."
I like public transportation. I was so impressed with the train system in Switzerland during my one visit many years ago. Those people can dig a hole thru anything.
Sadly, we didn't invest in mass-transit when we could afford it. I agree ricpic. Our public servants don't take pride. It's all graft now.
Now - everything is too costly and corrupt to build. so we mock it as a train or a bridge to nowhere. Which is what it will be... because it's all a shovel ready tax dollar train to nowhere.
Where I live, they spend endless millions on endless studies of the I-70 corridor, and nothing ever happens.
Chris Matthews - I stand in awe of his progressive brilliance.
The most fun is listening to progs whine about evil Repubs not spending enough in democrat controlled cities like Baltimore and De:toilet.
More tax dollars! It's never enough, you suckers.
The Northeast is where Amtrak is profitable, so that effectively "subsidizes" the rest. That's the only part where they need it, along with the West coast, and where they can really use upgrades to a decent, modern technology. Magnetic levitation tracks in Japan, France (and now CHINA! - Connies love anything China does) can now get up to 400 mph in experimental tracks, and something just shy of 300 mph practically. It makes a lot of sense.
So berate Matthews all you want. The point is that with mag-lev and other substantial high speed designs, you can't have turns that take you down to 50 mph every few miles. Or, I suppose you can, but not frequently, not without fucking up the quality of the route generally. But that's the way it is here. A lot of glitches fucking up the whole thing so that everyone gets their input into how to derail (no pun intended) the project as a whole. And sticking with as many old/existing infrastructure as possible just doesn't cut it. It's an excuse for heel-dragging.
You mean connies like Thomas Friedman ?
I happened to catch a bit of a CNN program... "BOMB TRAINS! CAN WE ROUTE THEM AROUND CITIES?"
Um... stupid CNN dude... Trains go TO places, not AROUND them...
DUH.
Ritmo is an expert on everything.
Well A.J., it's a lot better than claiming that being an uninterested ignoramus on everything is the way to go, like you do.
Tell me which other subjects I should avoid discussing, just so that I can prevent myself from insulting your lack of intelligence - ahead of time. Thanks.
Oftentimes, when a train is going north and they want to then go east, the train will go around a bend.
For a fraction of the investment you could improve air travel technology and infrastructure. Who the hell wants to go 300mph through trees, rocks, buildings and people, while every single foot of travel your life is at the mercy of any terrorist, stupid kid, or nutjob along the way with a derailment fantasy.
Rail is 19th century tech and high speed rail is like building wagons pulled by super shiny robot horses just because we can. Get up to speed. With the same or less investment we could make air travel that is substantially faster, infinitely safer, and both those things are already true at the start of the process. Trains are just dumb. It's a myopic obsession.
Sorry, Chrissy, there's a lot of stuff there you really can't go through. You have to go around.
But keep saying stuff like that. MSLSD may spare Ed Schultz and ax you.
Rhythm and Balls said...
So berate Matthews all you want. The point is that with mag-lev and other substantial high speed designs, you can't have turns that take you down to 50 mph every few miles.
Just what the Democrat-dominated Northeast needs, a railroad to nowhere like Moonbeam wants.
The trick of course is to slow down when going around a bend. It's kinda like driving, you know.
Isn't a levitated train just an airplane that foolishly flies 1 inch above the deadly terrain, requiring it to make turns, go over or under rock, buy up property, and permanently scar and disrupt the environment for thousands of miles.
With air travel routes can be changed as the population and demand moves. If a particular route is no longer useful, it can be redirected for almost zero cost immediately. No scars left behind on Gaia's face like an old hipster's tattoos, which also seemed like a cool idea at the time.
What happens to all this infrastructure when rail becomes obsolete, or is that impossible?
For a fraction of the investment you could improve air travel technology and infrastructure.
Watch, as a CEO makes the dunderheaded mistake of confusing separate customer bases. He should stick to his own industry, whatever that is.
Who the hell wants to go 300mph..
Lots of people do.
..every single foot of travel your life is at the mercy of any terrorist..
You're a riot. Train is much safer than air travel. And no 1 to 2-hour pre board check-in is a plus, also. As are no long layovers. Get out of your fucking private jet for a minute and wake up and smell the limitations of air travel.
Rail is 19th century tech and high speed rail is like building wagons pulled by super shiny robot horses just because we can.
Right. Magnetic levitation is 19th century tech.
Get up to speed.
Build your own 300 mph mode of ground transportation, then.
Just what the Democrat-dominated Northeast needs, a railroad to nowhere like Moonbeam wants.
Ed, "nowhere" is the part of flyover land that unemployed losers like you live in.
The Northeast and CA OTOH have many destinations that people actually want to stop at and see.
More chest-beating from the ape at the zoo no one wanted to visit. Doesn't know when to shut up.
And ed - if you say things that ignorant at a job interview, (or business meeting, I forgot that all Republicans are wanna-be pretend entrepreneurs), you shouldn't say such stupid things like that. It will totally tank the deal. Just don't do it. Don't be a dumbass.
I know that, for a guy like you, that's almost impossible, but at least try to hold your tongue and shut your face. It might save you.
Hey Shmedrick, Why do you avoid addressing the points of my arguments? You do have counter arguments don't you? Ad hominem attacks on someone you never met, or even know anything about, is pretty lame. It's like you never really thought about any of these these things. Try that, then dig through your talking points and look for one that adds something substantive. You do want to convince someone, don't you?
I gotta go, but I'll be back to read up and learn how new rail overcomes the obvious facts of physics and human nature.
You never make arguments. Just assertions. Without any evidence.
Ad hominem attacks on someone you never met, or even know anything about, is pretty lame. It's like you never really thought about any of these these things.
The way you lambaste an anxious market for high-speed rail, without ever meeting them or knowing anything about them, is also pretty lame. You can "think" as much as you want, but your market research on this is absolute shit, and obviously just substituted with your political talking points.
Trains are just dumb. It's a myopic obsession.
Getting from point A to point B is not a myopic obsession. It's how commerce happens and how life happens.
We might as well say that curing cancer, let alone liver cancer, is a myopic obsession. Better to just prevent it when you can, and fuck the market for those who claim they need it treated. Let them suffer and cut off NCI and NIH funding for all the basic research that the industry's taken from to find effective treatments for it, just like we should do to everyone whose lives and livelihoods in a heavily populated region are improved dramatically by diversifying and improving the transit options between them.
We do love Europe and we love our trains. Most of us ride trains to work.
We do love Europe and we love our trains. Most of us ride trains to work.
Well, Bag's anti-work so you'll get no sympathy from him on that.
I used to take the commuter train down to San Diego and back. Actually, I took my bike on board and made the connections to work and to home that way--that's how tree-hugging I was.
There is this stretch of trackage along the route which passes through the community of Del Mar. The tracks hug the shore and there isn't room for double tracks. A couple of wealthy homoaners who own property there have blocked expansion projects for decades. Basically, they bought Del Mar property back in the day and now they want the trains gone completely because they want La Jolla property values. I say fuck them. It's always a couple of loud individuals wrecking things.
Back "on track"....I'm sure that straightening the lines on the east coast (getting rid of curves) would require endless eminent domain actions along with concomitant gold-digging and rent-seeking by individuals looking out for themselves.
Heh Bago's absolutely brilliant arguments have knocked dumbass Ritmo way offstride.
Ritmo is helplessly sputtering but not speechless - unfortunately, for us, that will never happen.
Oceanside is actually a great commuter rail hub. It's the northern most stop for the San Diego commuter rails going south and east; it's also the southern most stop on the L.A. commuter train lines going north. Amtrak also stops here. The commuter trains all allow bikes on board. Amtrak is faster (fewer stops) and more expensive, but, they serve beer on board. My only gripe is that Amtrack doesn't allow pets (even small dogs) -- not even in cages in separate cars. This rule has foiled many-a-weekend jaunts up north to Hollywood where we have family.
I think that Ritmo had a point up there... sort of like April's point...
We could have upgraded trains or super fast commuter routes or this or that but everyone is trying to get their own way. There's no one to say that the decision is made and this is it, go forth and build something amazing and huge and the people will rejoice!
Won't happen. It's not that we don't have TRAINS... it's that we don't have nuclear plants, distributed thorium municipal power centers, springing up all over, we don't have massive desalination projects because no one can decide and everyone wants perfection or nothing, and no one will say "tough sh*t, sit down and like it, bozo, we're going to have a fleet of refurbed desalination tankers and you and your fussbutton friends and suck it", we're taking our dams *down*. But now and then people will want something like trains... not because they're gleaming testaments to the future and progress, but because they're quaint.
Somehow.
And also, if we can't build an oil pipeline because *scary*... we need to move oil on trains. Because trains are fun... like Thomas the Tank Engine... and old fashioned... with their little puff-puff-puff... makes people think happy thoughts.
We've got a couple commuter trains in New Mexico. Go from Albuquerque to Santa Fe to Socorro.
Thing is really... we need to do our urban planning different if we want to make better use of mass-transit or buses or anything. We like things spread out... SAFE... like, your work place can't be near your home, isn't near schools, and can't be by your shopping because we making shopping be in it's own "commercial" zone, and your work be in it's own "industrial" zone and there are schools in your "residential" zone, but not high school. Get a "food desert" because of zoning and fees... can't just open up a little shop on the corner.
Spent part of this week in Vallejo, California in the "historic" part of town... my brother lives in his wife's grandfather's old home... grandpa also owned a store on the corner of the same block. Had a second house there with a shop on the ground floor. Try building that now, next to your neighbor's in their houses. Just try.
Funny, I don't feed "off stride", whatever that means.
But I'm sure that if anyone knows what it's like to be off stride it's a guy like AJ, who waddles when he walks and occasionally has trouble picking his massive girth off the floor after he tumbles to a Chris Christie-like spill.
That's what happens when one's width surpasses one's height.
You'd actually think a guy like AJ would prefer rail to flight -- especially with all the increased user fees and obesity restrictions and double seat requirements a guy like him would be putting up with. Flying has not gotten any easier for the 300 pounders and up crowd.
Oh well. At least he can live vicariously though others, while he jerks himself off, like a drunken cheerleader, to Bag O's comments. Being able to do that is the most excitement he's gotten in decades.
If you thing modern trains actually go "puff puff" Synova then you really need to get out of the desert more.
"Puff puff" is the sound that AJ makes when he recovers from falling out of a chair.
It would actually be pretty easy to get AJ on a train. Just put an all-you-can-eat buffet-style snack bar on every other car and let him have at it. Construct rail stops along the way every ten miles stocked with nachos, corn chips, salsa, cheese, Big Macs, waffles, Shamrock Shakes, crab cakes, lobster rolls, bacon bits, cheesesteaks, iceberg lettuce, french fries, ice cream, donuts, and fried chicken.
He'd ride it every day.
I don't think he'd ever get off.
He might end up living on it.
After all, it would surely remind him of his mobile home.
We've government-ed our way to paralysis and waste. Shovel ready stimulus to nowhere. What? you believed us?
"It is an embarrassment, okay. And then when something like this happens, it is a tragic reminder, whether it’s human error or whatever, of where we are in our train travel and what that says about our larger infrastructure. But there are those in the Congress, who say wait a minute, Amtrak is poorly run, poorly managed, and the investments and the billions that we’ve put in in the past have been poorly spent. What do you say to taxpayers and to that?
--Some guy named Sesno
Never let a crisis go to waste.
Rhythm and Balls said...
Well A.J., it's a lot better than claiming that being an uninterested ignoramus on everything is the way to go, like you do.
I don't see that claim nor the subsequent caricature in AJ's comments.
I don't see that claim nor the subsequent caricature in AJ's comments.
And, I probably follow & read your commets and others here more closely than most people--more closely than I should.
Bagoh is right, as usual.
There’s this obsession, particularly on the East Coast, with moving lots of Americans around by train. The sophisticated Europeans do that, we should too. There’s so much know-nothingism at work here. In America we move stuff (i.e., freight) by rail and people by road (and plane). In Europe they do it the other way around. America’s freight rail system is the best in the world (which is why Warren Buffett keeps investing in it). The reasons for this arrangement have to do with population density, geography, etc. I’m not saying our passenger-rail system couldn’t be better, particularly in the Northeast. But this idea that we’re falling behind China on infrastructure is ridiculous. Just because the Morning Joe crowd doesn’t care about, or see, the freight rail system, doesn’t mean we should obviously blow it up to turn it into a passenger rail system.
More to the point, we have twice as much track in the U.S. as they do in China. China has four times our population, give or take, and hundreds of millions of people in abject poverty. They are awash in cash. They subscribe to a philosophy of massive state planning of the economy. Why are we surprised, never mind jealous, of them? We already have a lot of infrastructure. They don’t. Last I checked, we have eleven times more airports.
-Jonah G
And please, anybody can admire the Swiss train system, but keep in mind that the Swiss economy is basically one of entitled native Swiss lording over a large second-class citizenry. The "Swiss-model" is what we're headed for.
IOW, Ritmo has no rebuttal, so he just screams his usual vague insults.
BTW, I rode public transit around the Philadelphia area going to school and such for many years and for 4 years when I worked for the IRS, so I probably know a lot more about the experience than he does.
PS I don't see too many people flocking to his sarc wise /sarc counsel.
In fact, the next will be the first.
PPS Nowhere, more accurately is anywhere Ritmo happens to be at any given moment.
Construct rail stops along the way every ten miles stocked with nachos, corn chips, salsa, cheese,..
Nachos are corn chips, salsa, and cheese.
It's implied by his hatred for knowledge, Chickie.
Gee ed, that all you got.
A few more misspellings and erroneous word usage and you've got yourself a full-fledged resume for the unemployment office.
And you could get ed to ride the train by putting an unemployment office in it, and a sofa in his own car. He'd feel right at home!
Bag-O' could be enticed by putting a car full of elementary science experiments on it. It would be just like his Saturdays at the local children's science museum.
I do understand that, Chickl.
I once knew a couple who moved here from Switzerland. They "escaped" it for greener pastures of a freer America. They didn't like all the over-bearing social engineering and the super high cost of living and punitive taxation. They felt "suffocated". (to use their words)
Still, the Swiss rail system (which is partially private btw) is amazing. It's a tiny country filled with sharp pointy mountains and they turned it into swiss cheese. Get it - swiss cheese. ;-/ Glorious swiss cheese.
Amtrak has about 24,000,000 rider trips a year. Taxpayers contribute about $50 to every trip.
Assuming the average rider does a round trip, that translates to about 12,000,000 users per year, or 1,000,000 per month or 50,000 a day.That is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
And the average Amtrak user is a high income person. The discerning traveler, who is watching his pennies, can't afford to ride on Amtrak and opts instead for on of the intercity bus lines like Bolt.
You guys are a gas. Whether or not we become "more" like Europe or Switzerland has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with population.
If our population grows to become as great as theirs per square mile, then we will need to emulate their infrastructure and policy goals. That's just the way it is.
Conservatives seem to want this, but without the necessary follow-up.
Amtrak stats are meaningless unless you confine them to everything between Boston and DC. Other than that, the cons are right. They can take desolate flyover-land and leave it to languish. That's fine. But the Northeast makes great use of it, needs it, and benefits greatly from improvements to it. AJ knows this, as infrequently as he gets his fat buns out of his SUV in the suburbs and looks around to notice it.
I'd like to use a hammer.
"There’s this obsession, particularly on the East Coast, with moving lots of Americans around by train. The sophisticated Europeans do that, we should too. There’s so much know-nothingism at work here. In America we move stuff (i.e., freight) by rail and people by road (and plane). In Europe they do it the other way around. America’s freight rail system is the best in the world (which is why Warren Buffett keeps investing in it). The reasons for this arrangement have to do with population density, geography, etc. I’m not saying our passenger-rail system couldn’t be better, particularly in the Northeast. But this idea that we’re falling behind China on infrastructure is ridiculous. Just because the Morning Joe crowd doesn’t care about, or see, the freight rail system, doesn’t mean we should obviously blow it up to turn it into a passenger rail system.
More to the point, we have twice as much track in the U.S. as they do in China. China has four times our population, give or take, and hundreds of millions of people in abject poverty. They are awash in cash. They subscribe to a philosophy of massive state planning of the economy. Why are we surprised, never mind jealous, of them? We already have a lot of infrastructure. They don’t. Last I checked, we have eleven times more airports."
Ritmo:
Yes, we realize that stats aka facts are meaningless to you.
The discerning traveler, who is watching his pennies, can't afford to ride on Amtrak and opts instead for on of the intercity bus lines like Bolt.
Oceanside, home to Camp Pendleton, also has a thriving bus terminal. But these days, many enlisted are flying just like everybody else. No wonder there's perennial talk of building a major airport here.
I know it's hard for you to read, AJ, but try reading that again.
CL:
I have two young relatives who lived and studied in NYC. To get to and from Philly for holidays etc Amtrak was out of the question economically. They used the Chinatown bus services prior to Bolt etc going online. $10 to go from Philly to NYC or back.
So Amtrak, IMHO, should stand on its own two feet financially- it should not get more taxpayer money.
Blah blah blah Ritmo, as you know, businesses can cook the books and allocate costs arbitrarily, so I am skeptical Amtrak makes money on any of its lines.
And please stfu until you address Bago's excellent arguments.
Lets get real.
Ed Rendell, Obozo and her Thighness Queen Money-grubber couldn't build a Swiss rail system even if they had public support, a democrat controlled congress, a democrat controlled senate and a sure fire way to tax every US citizen at 80% and every evil rethuglican at 100%. (new ultra fair IRS law)
**with special tax exemptions for Clinton foundation donors**
In our modern corrupt political era, all that money would be wasted. Well, not according to ABC news.
Hey Fallin' out of the chair Christie AJ - as I said Baggie never made any arguments, just opinions and assertions, so until he provides any actual evidence of anything there's nothing to address. But since you're just like Chris CHristie (in looks and morals) and would orchestrate a traffic jam on crucial bridges I don't expect you to appreciate the importance of facts. Talk about cooking books. Lol. There's your hero for you.
You creeps are a blast. Thinking opinions are the same thing as arguments, and need to be addressed as such. Go back to your home-school and demand a refund.
I had a Lionel train set with only 072 turns, which are twice the radius of the standard 027 turns.
The early Lionel Union Pacific M-10000 streamliner only worked on 072 curves.
without wanting to Mathews may have stray into what I see as the biggest obstacle to trains as a viable competitive means of moving people. Trains, when compared to planes and buses, are less route change flexible.
If people stop going somewhere... trains keep making the same turns.
So, Bago said Mag Lev trains run an inch off the ground.Isn't that fact?
And he said, at an inch off the ground they would be at a greater risk to collide with something than a plane would? Isn't that a fact?
So, Bago said Mag Lev trains run an inch off the ground.Isn't that fact?
And he said, at an inch off the ground they would be at a greater risk to collide with something than a plane would? Isn't that a fact?
This falls under the category of too stupid to respond to. They are elevated on a thin layer of air because magnets repel. This cuts down on drag and allows for acceleration to very high speeds. And no, that does not mean they are at "great" risk for collision. They are prevented from leaving the tracks because the tops of the tracks flange outward to secure them in place. They are their own infrastructure and therefore wouldn't be at risk of being run at twice the recommended speed as your conductor in Frankfort was going due to the fact that it was older infrastructure upon which faster trains could travel.
Bag's comment wasn't worth responding to because there was nothing controversial or provocative about it. It's a basic fact.
You can even look it up. If you weren't afraid of your brain exploding and oozing out of your skull due to having actually learned an interesting fact or two.
What is wrong with you? You are seriously more scared than a rabbit of learning anything new or understanding a new technology. Are you sure your parents came from coal country? You strike me as someone descended from the bushmen tribes in The Gods Must Be Crazy, getting all spooked out over a Coca Cola bottle that fell from an airplane.
And he said, at an inch off the ground they would be at a greater risk to collide with something than a plane would? Isn't that a fact?
It's about as much a "fact" as saying that it's a "fact" that because the moon is light in color, it must be made of green cheese.
The pols are right. You guys really are afraid of your own shadows. Your world views and politics are almost completely driven by a paranoia over all the new things in the world that, despite being obviously and easily explicable to a college, grad, you know nothing about, and make fearsome stories about that would rival those told by Cargo Cults.
You all must please forgive me for speaking so harshly to AJ. I just seriously never realized exactly how great his fear of the modern world really was. I guess if I knew that little and feared that much, my reactions would be as strange as his.
I do hope he gets out more and tries and makes an effort at understanding the workings of all the planes, trains, and automobiles that make up life in the modern world and in a modern economy. He may end up even liking what he finds out.
If my four-year old nephew can do it, so can he.
I rode a MagLev train once at the Birmingham airport, on my way to Nottingham. It was a smooth ride.
I didn't know Britain had any maglev, but apparently it was an old system that was closed down in 1995. Glad to hear it was a smooth ride - that seems to be the experience it creates. A drag-less ride has huge advantages in multiple ways - as new technologies often do.
I really don't understand AJ's fear of it. The science behind it is pretty basic, and easily GOOGLEABLE.
@ Synova
It's not that we don't have TRAINS... it's that we don't have nuclear plants, distributed thorium municipal power centers, springing up all over, we don't have massive desalination projects because no one can decide and everyone wants perfection or nothing,...
good point.
I flew into Heathrow once. Took a crazy bus ride to Gatwick, then got on a plane at Gatwick and flew right over Heathrow.
My mistake. I thought Bago made some great arguments vs. Ritmo's plea for more and faster trains. But I guess Ritmo is just too dumb & doctrinaire to see his points.
But I guess Ritmo is just too dumb & doctrinaire to see his points.
I guess we must be using the word "see" differently. What I saw were assertions unsubstantiated by evidence. But apparently, when chicken little (not our Chickelit) squawks about the sky falling out, you take that to be a "fact" or an "argument". Just be aware that most educated, rational people don't find propagandistic scaremongering to be factual or sound argument.
There is nothing about using air instead of metal between you and a track that makes it more dangerous. Unless you're afraid of air, or just of air travel. But then that's an idiotic argument to use if you're going to say that airplanes are safer.
Seriously, I didn't realize you were such a fraidy-cat of magnets and air, AJ. DId you realize these things are all around you, every day? AIr and magnets won't kill you. Although for evolution's sake, it might be better for humanity if they did. I mean, it's not like some people can't drown in a bathtub.
Your reaction to maglev is like how the Ewoks of Endor responded to technology, before they started worshipping C-3PO like a god. You really do have this reaction of cowering in fear of anything different. It's kind of sad, but kind of funny. As I said, most children aren't as afraid of new things as you are.
But I guess Ritmo is just too dumb & doctrinaire to see his points.
I guess AJ is just too dumb and doctrinaire to see how dangerous water is given all the bathtub drownings.
I guess AJ is just too dumb and doctrinaire to see how dangerous electricity is given all the electrocutions occurring each year.
I guess AJ Lynch is just about to rally a successful effort to ban water and electricity in any technology, because they will surely hurt us.
@ Bagoh -
Isn't a levitated train just an airplane that foolishly flies 1 inch above the deadly terrain, requiring it to make turns, go over or under rock, buy up property, and permanently scar and disrupt the environment for thousands of miles.
Buying up property caught my eye. The government would have to find a way around that. Otherwise, that alone kills it.
What a buffoon. AIrports and highways also require property. Rail lines already exist. But there's no accounting for right-wing stupidity. Now the existence of linear space makes something evil. There's no end to it.
Rail is a great way to see the countryside from the ground that it actually exists on, instead of divvied up into the ugly agricultural squares and circles that carve up flyover land.
It also doesn't cause massive sheets of continental ice to fall off of the polar caps, ruin the oceans, and cause permanent droughts to the largest agricultural region of the U.S.
But taking up linear property space is much worse than all these things.
Keep up the sense of proportion, April. It's scaring AJ but unhinged reactions of all sorts pretty much define your politics.
Nobody said rail was evil. Why do you do that? It's like you're uneducated or something.
Your choice of words in your "arguments" (or lame ass opinions) make you seem desperate.
"It also doesn't cause massive sheets of continental ice to fall off of the polar caps, ruin the oceans, and cause permanent droughts to the largest agricultural region of the U.S."
God , you are such a brainwashed maroon. And now you jumped the shark.
I'm all for some public transportation. When and where it makes sense.
I was watching our local biased mainstream media news a while back. To my surprise, they actually accomplished some curious investigative reporting.
A new Light-Rail line recently opened running down the length of 6th Avenue - starting in Golden and ending in Denver. Great. cheers. All that.
The reporter calculated the cost comparison between taking the Light Rail Train V driving your own car. Turns out, driving your own car down 6th avenue is much much cheaper.
oops.
God , you are such a brainwashed maroon. And now you jumped the shark.
Really, AJ?
But at least I know how magnets work.
And unlike you, I'm not afraid of them!
But a guy who quivers in fear, hiding under his bed, so that the mean scary magnets (and air that they float on) don't get him, a guy who is afraid of knowledge and people who pursue it, this guy is calling others shark-jumping "maroons".
AJ, it doesn't end there. If we're not careful, air hockey tables might get out of hand, also.
We need to ban the use of air hockey tables, right AJ?
Nobody said rail was evil.
April, you're being more balanced. But if you read "AJ Lynch's" gurgles, you'll see that he actually believes technology based on magnets and a layer of air are apocalyptically unsafe.
He believes that Bag O' (whose "expertise" may or may not be in anything having to do with transportation, let alone maglev technology), told him so.
April - In Toronto, they found the light rail trolley routes are slow and wasteful and traffic bottlenecks, and as Bago stated, the existing routes are kinda hard to just pick up and re-locate.
I don't have anything against mass transit if it is economically competitive with other types of transit [i.e. car, bike, walking, horseback, bus lines, etc]
Balls. No. But you should pull that hockey stick out of your butt. It's managed to wedgie your frontal lobe.
Turns out, driving your own car down 6th avenue is much much cheaper.
For people who have cars.
Did he calculate in the cost of buying a car?
Oops.
Not being an expert at anything sure doesn't stop you Ritmo.
Ritmo, did you include the cost of the trolleys and installing the light rail lines and the debt service? Oops.
R&B wrote: Rail is a great way to see the countryside from the ground that it actually exists on, instead of divvied up into the ugly agricultural squares and circles that carve up flyover land.
Why pass just aesthetic judgement on more efficient methods of farming?
One of the uglier (macabre) places I've ever seen was the wind turbine graveyard in Hawaii. link
I don't have anything against mass transit if it is economically competitive with other types of transit [i.e. car, bike, walking, horseback, bus lines, etc]
Problem is, you dill rods cook the books endlessly on those numbers, also.
There is no alternative for regional or city-to-city transport of less than 300 miles that's faster than cars and less inconvenient than checking in and clearing security with the full body-image scans at Airborne Terrorism Central. Period. That's why through the Northeast, it makes money.
There's no "books cooked" on that stat. Throughout the northeast (and if they did it on the West coast) it would continue to make money.
But if it didn't, we could just disband it the same way we do all other subsidized, government-managed enterprises, like police forces, etc.
Why pass just aesthetic judgement on more efficient methods of farming?
Ask Bag O' and April why they passed aesthetic judgment on more efficient methods of transportation.
Getting back on track, wasn't Chris Matthews the guy who said he get a tinkle down his leg watching Obama?
I am in favor of looking at all alternatives.
For instance, for $1.2 Billion a year, the taxpayers could buy 30,000 vans at $40K each and let people use them to drive whereever they want. So shut down Amtrak and support the American auto industry by buying 30,000 vans a year for the 50,000 daily Amtrak commuters to use instead of the train.
WinWin!
Seems to me air travel should be part of our mass-transit solution.
It's not at all crazy to object to the idea that we cannot afford to keep pouring money into a losing proposition like Amtrak. It's less about the train itself, anyway. It's really about our inability to not waste money.
Look at the new VA Hospital here as an example. The will to do it is there, but corruption and waste win the day. The thing is millions upon millions over-budget and still not finished.
It's not idea that is the problem- ideas can be debated - it is truly that we can no longer do anything without waste, shovel ready bogus promises and corruption.
Many years ago now, then Governor Owens(R) successfully expanded and modernized I-25 in the south Denver corridor. It was under budget and finished ahead of schedule. It is also a pleasing stretch to drive with new bridges. Great job. All done with an R governor. oh noez! how that be? He so supidz.
Our current governor, Hickenlooper, is ruling over a mess on Highway 36. It is taking forever, it is ugly, and we had to sell the actual road to some country in South America. yeah. and it will now be a toll road.
buggers to that.
yeah - nobody has a car. what was he thinking?
Chickie - yes. Matthews is leg tingle boy.
Brooks is crisp pant crease man.
So billions of dollars to subsidize those who cannot afford a car, and it costs the person taking the ride 4+ bucks each way... each day.
That's 8 bucks per day. that's 40 bucks a week. All extracted from the poor guy who cannot afford a car - or the greeny perv who thinks his decision is saving the planet.
April - Ritmo thinks only his ideological opponents cook the books so he insinuated your analyst was dishonest or incompetent or both and failed to include the cost of the car in his analysis.
AJ - Yeah the local democrat news guy must be wrong.
The "news" guy just did the basic math. For those who want to ditch their car and take the light-rail as an alternative, it will actually cost more. That's all.
Plenty of people are OK with it, because green. or because mass-transit.
I'm not so sure that line was a good idea. They are installing a line from downtown Denver to the airport. I will be curious how the math works out on that one.
Or we could take the 1.2 Billion and buy 1,200 luxuries buses at $1MM each to transport the 50,000 users each day.
@ Chicklit -Great link to the Hawaiian graveyard of ugly rusted wind turbines.
Anything to prevent the deployment of useful technology.
Fear the future, Republicans!
Long distance Amtrak is enjoyable. Try the Train ride from Chicago to LA. Great scenery.
I'd suggest a sleeping compartment though.
Do they look like this?
I found a photo of chickelit on the Birmingham Maglev.
He's the one on the left with the cool burns. I think.
yeah - nobody has a car. what was he thinking?
Probably that it costs nothing for purchase, maintenance, and everything else. Sort of like what you think.
What's the average car cost? $15 - $20,000? Obviously taking a train regularly costs more than that.
Viva Solyndra! You scared freaks.
I'm open to hearing out the political party that gave us 1929 and 2008 on sensible economic policies related to daily commutes.
Do they look like this?
The metal in those cars was recycled. Not so the windmills.
Ok old windmills are worse than old cars. If it's new or innovative and helpful and not subsidized by the consumer spending 20k on it (plus their own maintenance) then it's bad. You guys are hard to keep up with but it sounds like those are the basic rules for con infrastructure, so I'll try to keep them in mind.
Balls has dreams of the future
After all, 2008 and 1929 cost the consumer nothing!
Lol. Has Mumbai really gotten that far advanced?
Seems to me air travel should be part of our mass-transit solution.
Not so, April. Lynchie says that floating on an inch of air is very dangerous so obviously air is a bad thing to make use of as a part of our travel.
He said he got the idea from Bag O'.
GM and the Big Three cost the consumer nothing!
GM and the Big Three cost the taxpayer nothing!
The Iraq war cost the voter nothi--
Oh well. You get the picture.
If you're a Republican, the rules don't apply.
Cars cost society nothing!
Car accidents are non-existent!
Drunk drivers cost society nothing!
Pedestrians being hit by motorists don't exist!
I hear the government is subsiding the purchase of a Tesla and a Leaf.
What the F?
Can't you rich greenies just pay for something without the tax payer for once?
Balls was all for the GM bailout! now with more fiber!
Air travel is very convenient!
Taking an hour for pre-boarding costs the traveler nothing!
Being confined to ten horizontal inches of seating space and no room to recline is not a problem!
Being in a flying Nazi transport carrier in the sky is a great way to travel!
Balls was all for the GM bailout! now with more fiber!
A good thing, too. Else you'd be advocating as a sole travel option something that doesn't even have any American ownership and less American labor.
Which is not a problem!
Are you arguing with the wall now?
Who said any of this? Nobody who has ever flown will ever argue or disagree that it isn't a royal pain. But when air travel goes smoothly,. you can get from Boston to London is about 8 hours. LA to NY City in about 6 hours.
Yeah -- that sucks man!
It sounds like you fly a lot, April. So you must have a favorite airline. Let me guess… is it United?
By the time I land in San Fransisco, you'll be snapping your Seat belt around your waist in Philly.
Are you arguing with the wall now?
Who said any of this? Nobody who has ever flown will ever argue or disagree that it isn't a royal pain. But when air travel goes smoothly,. you can get from Boston to London is about 8 hours. LA to NY City in about 6 hours.
Yeah -- that sucks man!
If you changed your name to "wall", then maybe so. Because rail connecting LA and NY or Boston to London is the height of retardation. All of my comments made it clear that I'm talking about city-to-city or regional travel of 300 miles or less. That's what's needed and that's where it makes the most sense.
What's with these all-or-nothing ultimatums on the part of you guys? Is that why you don't understand economics? It's about trade-offs for specific needs, not replacing every option.
Duuuuuude……..
United. Not a fan.
This is a true story.
Guy with a guitar watched in horror out the plane window while the United baggage people abused his guitar on the tarmac.
United. Not a fan.
Yeah, and they're one of the biggest and nastiest and most aggressive of the very consolidated bunch.
Listen, alternatives are needed yesterday. Mandating air travel as the only quick way to go from Boston to DC or Pittsburgh to Chicago (or any of the other regional trip) is the height of stupidity.
That's all I'm saying.
Or SF to LA. LA to Vegas. Vegas to Salt Lake City.
You get the picture.
It shouldn't be hard for the "hard thinkers" of the right to understand the concept of a 300-mile travel distance.
Nobody is mandating anything.
sheesh.
Actually anything up to 450 miles each way should be competitive. Sorry.
Now he is an economics expert in addition to engineering and physics. I suggest you learn a bit more about human psychology before you try and force your librul psychoses on the rest of us.
Nobody is mandating anything.
sheesh.
A mandate for what supposedly shouldn't be done, a "negative mandate", still sounds like a mandate to me.
Now he is an economics expert in addition to engineering and physics. I suggest you learn a bit more about human psychology before you try and force your librul psychoses on the rest of us.
I suggest you even learn what a book is and how to open it before you rattle off all the fields upon which you will not tolerate any thought.
Seriously, this guy's afraid of air, magnets and basically everything but rattlesnakes, and he's talking about what other people haven't bothered to learn about.
I suggest you learn a bit more about human psychology before you try and force your librul psychoses on the rest of us.
The psychology of right-wing anxiety-riddled sociopaths like AJ Lynch is not conventional psychology, so it doesn't apply. Normal psychology is not that hard to know something about.
But I still have managed to learn something about it.
Seriously, you're like Tony Soprano. A fat, uneducated sociopath, subject to panic attacks. Do the similarities ever end?
I would love perfectly smooth safe forms of transport.
Heck - what we all really want is the molecule beam-me-up transfer system so we don't even continue
this tedious conversation.
It's not about the train. We no longer have the ability to do it. Too much waste and fraud.
Do you listen to yourself, Ball.s? You sound nuts.
Well, I am listening to AJ Lynch, April.
He said he's afraid of maglev technology. Called it unsafe without even giving a real-life reason why.
AJ said it's wrong for people to talk about anything he doesn't know about.
Well, that rules out everything but fairy dust and Leave It to Beaver.
It would really limit a sane person's conversation options if we let him write the rules.
So, like a kid who stayed up past his bedtime to run around the party downstairs, I kind of need to shoo him away every now and then.
Trust me, I don't want to do that. But it's necessary.
Wow, so this is what Ritmo is like off his meds.
Marc Lamont Hill meets Kathy Griffin.
Check out what goes on at AJ's favorite mode of transportation!
Why aren't the tracks banked at the curve so that trains can fly around them at 100 MPH or higher? Eh? That would be so completely ace.
If trains went faster than cars then the whole thing would be worth it and lot more fun passing up all those schlubs in their cars. But no. They're slower. You see cars passing you up and that takes the fun right out of it. The whole time you're thinking, I could be in my car and going fast then parking right there, no other connections at all.
In Denver they don't even check if you paid. I think it's the honor system. I rode it, like five times, I think, and they never checked. Would you like to see one of the rides?
Why do Democrats insist on forcing everyone else to live pages straight out of Atlas Shrugged then laugh and giggle and ridicule any such comparison, even as they live the roles of characters so clearly perceived and delineated by Rand in that book? Same as their acceptance of criminality I suppose, because they can't help it.
Why aren't the tracks banked at the curve so that trains can fly around them at 100 MPH or higher? Eh? That would be so completely ace.
Cause you tricks keep denying the funds for upgrades. Hello.
Late one afternoon on our honeymoon on the big island, we decided, on a lark, to drive down to South Point. My judgement of the distance was faulty and the timing proved to be a mistake.
We headed down the narrow two lane road that seemed to go on forever into the middle of nowhere. On the way it got dark, really dark. Don't remember if it was overcast or just moonless, but we couldn't see much of anything beyond the headlights and we seemed to be the only people on the road. We were in a rental Camero convertible with the top down.
This was before we had cell phones and, to tell you the truth, it was a little spooky. Then, in the dim light, coming up on the right we could vaguely see, near the side of the road, a dozen or more of these gigantic, alien-looking windmills. There seemed to be others off in the darkness. Some of them were turning and making a deep whoosh-whoosh noise. You could feel it. Later I learned that this was the Kamaoa Wind Farm part way into its eventual shut-down.
We stopped to gawk, turned off the headlights, and got out of the car. The spookiness soon evolved to creepiness, and we jointly decided to continue our trek south.
Soon we ran out of road and were driving on dirt. Found a boat repair place that was deserted and finally we gave up and headed home with a sense of failure and relief.
United breaks guitars Part II.
United refused to admit they were wrong and they refused to compensate him. So he made all these videos and finally United gave in.
(part II)
So windmills are scary, too, Rabel?
@ chip Why do Democrats insist on forcing everyone else to live pages straight out of Atlas Shrugged then laugh and giggle and ridicule any such comparison, even as they live the roles of characters so clearly perceived and delineated by Rand in that book?
I often ask myself the same q.
You are wrong, Balls.
Wrong.
But you are adept at the left's coordinated fraud-filled talking points.
PTC would have prevented this one but your "citizen reporter" neglected to review the fact that rail upgrades are highly desired and can be used to re-route tracks so that no curves this steep, with a 50 mph limit, would have been necessary.
MSNBC - the only reliable source for crap.
"So windmills are scary, too, Rabel?"
I looked over the thread and can't find anything to indicate that it would be productive to engage you on the subjects at issue.
Eh - leftists and their predictable shameful pandering.
Oh, and contrary to the media’s “Amtrak fan fiction,” as Sean Davis calls it, Congress just authorized $1.4 billion in new subsidies to Amtrak less than five months ago. So there goes that narrative.
oops. so what - lie anyway!
Don Quixote also thought windmills were scary.
He "tilted" at them.
Half the thread was comprised of my shock at learning that a grown man (AJ) was as afraid of magnets as he appears to be, Rabel.
Please excuse my reaction to the extent of a grown man's fear like that.
Or at least, if you could forgive it.
Good night.
Good night moose.
Good night, train.
Good night, caboose.
And the papa papoose.
And the mama grizzly.
Shootin' wolves.
Good night.
All is forgiven. Let's all join hands and sing a song!
This is one sorry pathetic thread (reminiscent of another blog of note)...however, for those who think "straightening" rail rights of way would be a solution in urban areas, let me know how you feel if they take your house and home via eminent domain. Here where I live we've got a few thousand folks who have an opinion on that...they used to live in what is now called "Poletown." BTW, all y'all bailed that facility out in the last crash in 2008...and you will again when the next crash occurs. Enjoy.
Drinking and posting... never a good combo.
Wow! All that and not a single explanation of why it makes sense to pull planes down from the sky, slow them down and then make them fly an inch off the ground through the countryside on extremely expensive environmentally disruptive and scaring infrastructure you don't need to build at all. It almost sounds like spending money and fucking up the environment is the real objective. That's not nice.
@Rabel: I like that song (who doesn't). Though immortalized by Arlo Guthrie, it was written by Steve Goodman. I mentioned that once and Goodman's biographer "tracked" me down in the comments: link
bagoh20 ... actually you make a very good point. I've worked on railroad equipment and track systems...it is a tedious 24/7 proposition, hell just maintaining gauge at 58.5 inches is a never ending chore. Fail just that simple but arduous chore and trains go off the tracks. Railways in most places always disrupt a country side or a neighborhood. Always.
Funny thing is I used to really like rail transportation before the advent of aircraft going everywhere. Today it is far less pleasant....the feds and my city just built a big fancy new Amtrak station (5 times bigger than the previous one, a literal whistle stop, on the line Detroit to Chicago)....to provide service to Chicago that takes 9 hours plus, more than double the time it takes to drive via I-94 Freeway...triple the time it takes to fly from DTW to Chicago Midway, including the parking and boarding hassle time. Something is "wack" in the planning there...especially since the fed money went away last month when building finished, and the operation cost is going to be city funded.
I fail to see how this improves anything since Eisenhower mandated the nation's express way system. Connections to places west are abysmal ... getting to Boseman, Montana is nearly an impossible array of stops and train changes...again taking as much time or more than just driving, and far far more than flying DTW to BZN. Go figure.
Ari:
They don't believe in doing cost/benefit analysis to justify a project. The feds write a check that must be spent on X , Y or Z type projects and no one considers the operating costs after the project is built. Of if they do, it is a kinda "If We Build It The Passengers Will Come With Their Money."
Wow! All that and not a single explanation of why it makes sense to pull planes down from the sky…
No one ever said anything about "pulling planes down from the sky," you malignant liar. It almost makes someone have to drink to talk with you natural winos. Not that I did or would, but I can see why you'd get that impression given the sort of stupor-induced nonsense I have to respond to.
...environmentally disruptive and scaring infrastructure…
A guy ignorant enough to actively deny the role of a planet's own atmosphere in regulating its climate has no business opining on what's "environmentally disruptive".
We like trains because... trains. Because Thomas the Tank Engine. They're quaint and homey, even the gleaming supersonic maglev ultra supersonic sort. In our minds they occupy a space that makes us feel all warm and cuddly. Puff-puff-puff. Ritmo can pretend not to understand what I'm talking about, but that just makes him look dumb. He can pretend not to understand what Bagoh is saying about slowing planes down and making them fly one inch off the ground, but that just makes him look dumb.
Do you know what trains are? They're ethernet cable run through a house. Great stuff. For about a 5 year window until someone just invented a wireless hub for home networks.
Imagine someone, today, gushing on about how they're going to wire their whole house for a computer network.
Well, if anyone is more concerned with looks than with substance, Synova - it's your crew.
Stop being a retard. These are very concrete advantages:
1. No wasted one-hour pre-board check-in.
2. No too uncomfortable for anyone (even AJ) 10 inch horizontal seat restriction. (And why would anyone refuse to believe that a system is over-taxed when they pack people in like sardines like that? I guess conservatives just like being treated like the human cargo on the transport trains to Auschwitz).
3. No full image body scans or groping.
4. No total travel times for medium trips (<450 miles) that take longer to get from destination to destination than they need to.
5. More travel options are always better, and promote competition. That is, unless you're a Republican corporatist slave who prefers to be dictated to by the United/US Scareways oligopoly on what's what.
Anyone who can't understand all those advantages is either a blind corporatist shill or a weed firmly planted in their backwater province, with little understanding of the advantages of travel.
Most major cities on the East coast are less than 300 miles from each other. No one who lives there (as opposed to the deserted flyover land you live in) is ignorant of the advantages afforded by the rail infrastructure that connects them.
By all means, those of you who live in deserted islands of backwardness have every right to wall yourself off from as many land-based connections to the next deserted island as you like. You don't have what it takes for the smoother commerce and tourism advantaged by rail to make a difference for you, anyway, as less people want to live there, less tourists visit there, and less companies do business there.
But this incident didn't take place in Arizona. So butt the fuck out and allow the civilized people to improve and upgrade the networks that work for them as they like.
The rest of you desert-dwellers are free to live like Arabs.
In our minds they occupy a space that makes us feel all warm and cuddly.
I suppose what makes Synova feel "all warm and cuddly" is:
1. Being body-image scanned and/or groped and molested by TSA.
2. Being packed buttcheek-to-sweaty buttcheek in minimal seat space next to a few fatties with large butt skin-folds draping down into her lap.
3. Wasting an extra hour needed to be at the airport.
4. Taking the most terrorism-prone mode of transportation possible.
5. Paying extra to check-in the luggage you want to take with you.
6. Decreasing options in the U.S. travel market and making sure the two worst airlines (is it a coincidence that they're American companies?) control the industry.
Hope you're feeling all "warm and cuddly" about all that, Synova. And if you're not, the adjacent, obese passenger has a nice big flap of warm, sweaty butt-cheek to douse you with.
At what point, at all, are trains and train travel automatically immune from TSA type restrictions or cattle-car conditions?
You didn't list anything, not ONE THING, intrinsic to train travel that makes it better.
I listed 5 or 6 things, actually.
It's obvious that, not only have you never ridden a train, you actually don't know anything about them apart from what a child growing up in 1950 learned about them. Further, you make up a fantasy whereby the experience of boarding and riding one has anything to do with what's been made a regular part of plane travel.
Stop. You are embarrassing yourself.
I understand that, for the right-wing paranoia-propaganda machine to work, outlandish theories must be created and maintained. But please, body scanners for boarding trains? They don't even have the infrastructure for scanning people and luggage in the lines where people board. Nor will they. Ever.
Why can't you just stick to the usual machinations? These stories about applying plane restrictions to train travel are so desperate, a normal person would have to read what you wrote about them to believe them.
I am astounded by how desperate you are. You would seriously say the sky is yellow at this point in order to get your political point scored.
This explains Republicanism. Desperation so acute that no fantasy is too outlandish to make-up to distract from it.
I am embarrassed for you.
There is no functional reason that a train is roomy and pleasant and a plane is cramped and has you walk past a TSA nudie machine.
The cattle-car experience is to get as many warm bodies on the transport as possible. Be it an airplane or a subway or the wonderful wonderful trains that dart you around Japan. The term "cattle car" is a train term, after all.
You say that there will never be annoying security and delays to get you on a train. Ever.
You can't explain why not, ever. You just say so. Particularly if there are all these super fast (ie., they don't *stop* every little bit) trains that go super fast for long distances. Some one blows one up and *shazam*... nudie scanners and lines. They add some cars for poor people with discount tickets and *shazam*, cattle cars.
I'm not saying it would happen, I'm saying that you haven't even tried to bother to explain why it wouldn't. Your idea of argument is "it just won't, dummy, republican, anti-science, idiot" and apparently the only reason it won't is because you said so.
You list the downsides of air travel as if those things aren't artificial relics of political paranoia and then expect this to be taken as thoughtful?
What the hell is a "functional reason"? I'm talking about REALITY. Reality exists whether you can find a reason for it or not, Lady.
That said, there are potentially plausible reasons for why you aren't shoved into a baby seat on a train: 1. Air travel is EXPENSIVE and COSTLY. Fuel costs, security costs, safety costs ALL ADD UP. So the airlines obviously have an interest in packing in as many warm bodies into as many midget-seats as possible.
This will continue until rail or other non-air alternatives become more widespread, as they are along the East coast. In economics this is called "substitutable". Instead of flying or driving from Boston to DC, you take rail. Or a bus. It works and it drives down prices for both travel modes. And incentivizes airlines to make their travel options either more attractive or less nasty. They no longer have to compete on the basis of just being the sole provider of that travel, but for a reason a train ride can't provide. Or, for something else - such as Cathay Pacific does when it offers luxurious sleeping suites, etc.
What the hell is wrong with you? This is basic economics. It shouldn't be difficult to understand; Republicans like to go around pretending that they invented economics.
Disappointing.
As for security, you remind me of Ali G. Man, what a bozo. He interviewed the head of Homeland Security and asked about the danger of trains being hijacked. The guy gave a perplexed response. Hijacking is what made airlines a security threat in the first place. Since trains do not offer terrorists that handy option of being hijacked, there is less of a security threat to them.
So that inconvenience is also decreased. As is the cost associated with it. You might have noticed that TSA's efforts along the Amtrak lines and NJ Transit and SEPTA and METRA and MBTA and BART and ALL THE REST OF THAT are negligible, amounting to a minuscule proportion of what's spent securing air travel.
See? I need to explain all these things to you because you're not aware of them, I suppose. Maybe you've never been to SF, NYC, Boston, DC, Chicago or the many other major cities in this great country where so much of the actual population lives, and where so much of its culture is made, where so much of its commercial activity takes place, where so much livelihood is generated. And that's your choice.
But don't pretend that I'm a bad person for expecting that someone dictating terms on the infrastructure that ACTUALLY SERVES so much of America's population, actually UNDERSTANDS how that infrastructure works.
If you have honest questions, and have never visited these cities, or seen how their transit systems work, what you can do is something called asking a question nicely. If you did that, instead of dispensing with snide comments about shiny train cars and mesmerizing technology, maybe I or anyone else who's familiar with it wouldn't respond negatively.
But you didn't.
And I guess that's just how it goes in America. One person's ignorance is as good as another person's knowledge. And sure, you have the right to that attitude. But don't expect me to respect and respond nicely when that attitude of yours is just as insulting, as well as wrong, and, obviously, a bad approach.
Learn how to live with others. This is their country, also.
R & B ... the only embarrassing thing on this thread is your adamant implication that cramped corridors like the north east, and some fantasy about the west coast, nearly equally cramped, are be all and end all of train travel...and the fly-over folks are loons.
Odd, then,that I agree that train travel in the northeast should be the best it can be, since the relatively short distances between dense municipalities makes airline travel a chore.
I question if you have anything near my experience with airplanes and trains, given I'm one of those 1950's troglodytes who rode both great passenger trains east-west, as well as flew on DC-3's, at an early age....such as age 10 - 15. I loved the trains of that era, but they no longer exist except in the corridors of urban density. There is almost no where I can travel by comfortable trains between Detroit and the rocky mountain west with more hassle than flying, and in most cases today I would be forced to take a bus for a large chunk of the distance to get anywhere in the west. No thank you.
Your belittling of the central part of the USA is bothersome, but it's your opinion, and your right to feel that way. Never mind the contributions the fly-over folks have contributed to the nations welfare including the dense urban centers on the east coast...where I agree that modern efficient train travel is a good idea...that does not mean we "hicks" are bound to the concept over a much wider area.
These days I'm almost inclined to just drive my truck, and skip both air and rail travel, both suck, and though it takes longer and costs more, I'll be seeing more of the countryside than by other travel means. I consider that, today, a virtue. In my dotage I am planning to revert to the "road trips" of my impoverished college days, just for the fun of it, and skip being shunted to obscure locales by trains or herded like cattle on aircraft.
I've been around the world, so to speak, and enjoyed trains where they served a purpose and weren't a hassle, even if that meant sharing economy class with sundry sheep, pigs, chickens and their tenders, which I've done many times.
As I said earlier, you can paint your wagon any color you wish, but it won't make it pretty....especially if it requires herky-jerk schedules and more stops than a Conestoga wagon.
As sometimes happens, you're missing the point, Dog. Regional travel infrastructure is regional. As long as you're not telling the Acela what it should do, I have no problem with how you want to get to and from Detroit. Although, as you'll see in my comment, I did point out that Chicago's METRA does a good job of providing modern rail, as well. Or, at least it did the last time I was on it.
R & B ... sorry, I am NOT missing the point. I responded to what you wrote and how you wrote it. That you cannot see that is out of my control.
You seem satisfied with good rail service in the NE corridor, and dang the rest of us. Part of the problem you seem to cite then ignore is the idea of "regional" service in enclaves. Translation: "uncoordinated." One of my best ever rail experiences was Detroit to Chicago to St Louis and then to Colorado Springs as an unaccompanied kid of 13. It was coordinated and linked seamlessly, with easy changes at the cities I cite, as it should be....today that is not the case. If you are satisfied with that, so be it.
Post a Comment