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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (16315)	3/24/2000 3:59:00 AM
From: greenspirit	Respond to of 769667

Excellent points lather. When you really analyze the practical issue involved with a massive train system meeting the needs of all citizens, it truly is a central planner logistical utopian dream. 50 years from now, cars will fly in the air and pollute at a 10th of the level of today. When they do, the need for roads will slowly fade away, just as train stations for every day travelers do today. That's the thing about a competitive free enterprise system. It's constantly improving, innovating and changing. Trains simply don't have the consumer acceptance or momentum to engender that kind of rapid innovation. Improving our roads, looking for ways to encourage the automobile industry to create engines which pollute less, are safer, and get better gas mileage should be the route ahead. Attempting a central planning model which first changes the entire culture, and then planning and implementing a trillion dollar national railroad system would be a tremendous waste! Trains can alleviate traffic problems in a few locations. So can busses. I enjoyed the buss system in Honolulu when I lived there quite a bit. But let's try and be realistic about it. Besides commuting to and from work on the Metro, very few people use them for everyday purposes. They simply don't want to. Most Americans enjoy the feeling of freedom a car gives you. Huge elaborate interconnected train systems probably look lovely when written up in some academic thesis. Only one thing missing. Enrollment by passengers to sustain the enterprise. Michael

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (16315)	3/24/2000 12:00:00 PM
From: Brian P.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Thanks for your response. Your objections contain a number of understandable misconceptions about the car culture and mass-transit and indicate how little intelligent, educated Americans really understand about the underpinnings of the car culture, for example, how much their government now massively subsidizes cars--yes--your government--Federal, state, and local--massively subsidizes cars so that they seem much more economical than they really are and disincentivizes mass transit in myriad ways so that it seems now so unattractive and clumsy. The reality is that the "economics of transport" are now "artificially distorted" in favor of the car. The free market as a natural balancer of costs and benefits does not operate. This is THE central insight that needs to be understood. I am no expert on this, but later tonight or this weekend I will post excerpts from Jane Kay's book that I hope will make this clearer to those who are open-minded. I highly recommend this book, as well as the other book I've mentioned, George Kennan's Around the Cragged Hill . Both these authors are sober, intelligent, conservative people of good sense. This car issue is not a conservative or liberal one--you can marshal sound arguments for it from either perspective. Really. You know, in a real sense, concern for the environment and the architecture and texture of our lives in cities and towns and country is an archetypal conservative issue. Conservatism often gets confused with unrestrained 19th century economic liberalism, resulting in incoherence.