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

To: tejek who wrote (602289)	3/2/2011 7:24:42 PM
From: Brumar89	2 Recommendations Respond to of 1571707

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. There's already a way for these folks to get around - Greyhound. Are people really going to like train travel better than bus travel? I wonder why liberals aren't pushing bus travel. It saves energy, but it doesn't require massive state and federal involvement. You can pre-determine ridership based on densities and freeway driving. You can't just assume freeway drivers will become train travelers. a train going from Chicago to St. Louis might stop in Bloomington, Champaign Urbana and Springfield: Damn, did you even look at the map you posted? That would be a big jag off to the east to take in Urbana. And stopping at those three cities is going to take time - might as well take Greyhound. It would be faster.

To: tejek who wrote (602289)	3/7/2011 11:58:57 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1571707

You can shift trains as well. Not nearly as much, and even if you could it wouldn't matter as much. Much of the cost is for the rails, they don't shift. (You can tear up old track and build new track but that's new investment not a re-purposing of the old.) The trains can shift to some other place but only where the rails are in place, and the rails will remain where they are however you shift the trains. 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. 1 - Downtown to downtown doesn't represent a majority of travel. 2 - Even downtown to downtown, and even with extra time for security screening, for the longer routes where they compete air travel is still faster, and for the shorter routes many will prefer to take cars. You could perhaps find some ideal medium where (for downtown to downtown only and assuming security screening doesn't get added for rail) rail will be the fastest, but then you are spending a lot of money for a relatively limited number of trips, esp. if your trying to fund a nationwide system or series of major regional systems just on the justification for the trips that are ideal for high speed rail. Most of the major HSR lines in Europe are profitable No they aren't. Also Europe has a higher population density. people preferring training rather than flying on routes similar to the distance between Chicago and St. Louis, Some people. Others don't. If those people want to pay for it themselves, others might prefer such trips but not if they have to pay the real costs for them. If people who greatly prefer taking the train on such trips want to pay the costs themselves, I have no objections.