To: greenspirit who wrote (15776 ) 3/19/2000 6:30:00 PM From: Brian P. Read Replies (2) | Respond to
Enough to get people to stop feeling it is quite necessary to drive ridiculous, expensive, enormous polluting several-tons-more-than-necessary SUV's back and forth to the supermarket. This would be using the market to regulate behavior. Sound Republican policy. Plow the proceeds into developing an attractive, efficient, national bullet-train network between Boston and New York and Washington and all the major cities in this country that people would actually use. This country used to have a wonderful, attractive, train network that people loved, until the auto companies conspired to end the great era of the efficient train and addict us to the auto. Trains had beneficial social effects in concentrating people in defined communities at railheads, in towns, emphasizing the attractions of real places and spaces, and not dispersing them like ants across the suburbs as the auto has done. PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA OF THE HIDDEN COSTS OF THE their addiction to the AUTOMOBILE. They pay huge TAXES to fund highways and roads every-friggin-where and never think twice about it--the biggest congressional pork-barrel boondoggle ever!-- and yet say "I don't want to pay for a train system with my taxes!" They pay huge costs to maintain their autos and their dependence on the auto to do anything anymore and never think twice about it. They know not of what they speak. We need a fifty-year national transportation policy that would wean us gradually off our addiction to the auto and back to sensible use of the auto and back to trains--efficient, wonderful, high-speed trains--with modern technology (high-speed)that shrinks the great distances of this country, a rail network like Switzerland has is actually possible. It took us fifty years to get into this addiction, it will take us fifty years to detoxify us.
