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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (601442)	2/22/2011 9:37:08 AM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 1571644

Planes will usually be pretty full on all routes ... they need to be to make money. And they'll add or drop flights (and overbook) as needed.

To: TimF who wrote (601442)	2/22/2011 10:24:02 AM
From: i-node	Respond to of 1571644

>>>>It might makes sense for some routes. The north east corridor (if it would actually be high speed rail, rather than "just slightly faster rail) in particular, maybe connecting CA's larger cities. My view as well. But there is a real basic problem with the president's plan. Instead of putting money into true high speed routes that make sense , they will put money into many routes that will be slow and therefore run empty like so many AMTRAK trains. I have ridden the City of New Orleans during holiday traffic when we were among a half dozen passengers in an entire car. Still, I think some added routes make sense. Connecting major traffic corridors like Houston and Dallas make sense to me. But when you include Waco and San Antonio to the south and Little Rock and Tulsa to the north it is just lunacy...one more systemic drain on the nation's resources.

To: TimF who wrote (601442)	3/2/2011 6:03:36 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571644

If the planes are full between Chicago and St. Louis, so then will be HSR. That doesn't logically follow. Planes are flexible, you need the airports at both locations, and aircraft to service the route, but if the route doesn't fill all the planes scheduled for it, they airlines will shift them to other routes. You can shift trains as well. In addition, trains will pull people out of their cars. There is a sizable number of people who refuse to fly and drive when they have to go someplace. Those people can be prime train travelers. Rail doesn't just need the stations and rolling stock, you have to specifically lay out all the rail between the two locations. If a route doesn't get as much use as expected the passenger miles per dollar invested in setting up that route go down. You can pre-determine ridership based on densities and freeway driving. And trains don't got in a straight line.....if they did, they would save more time. Instead, they will hit the medium size cities along the way. For an example, a train going from Chicago to St. Louis might stop in Bloomington, Champaign Urbana and Springfield: Also aircraft are faster, even with time for security checkpoints the trip takes less for many of the longer routes (while on the shorter routes trains compete with cars). Not when a traveler is going from downtown to downtown. Often times travel times are very similar. It might makes sense for some routes. The north east corridor (if it would actually be high speed rail, rather than "just slightly faster rail) in particular, maybe connecting CA's larger cities. But for most locations it doesn't make sense with our population density and existing interstate highway system. (China not only has higher population density, and a clustering of its large cities that fits rail travel better, it also has a lot less highway and air infrastructure and equipment per person.) The plan isn't for Fargo to Rapid City, but it does have a a Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati-Indianapolis corridor, a connection from Buffalo to Albany, one from New Orleans to Meridian Mississippi to Birmingham to Atlanta (with only the last being a fairly major city). Most of the major HSR lines in Europe are profitable and like I pointed out previously, people preferring training rather than flying on routes similar to the distance between Chicago and St. Louis,