Back on the subject of trains. (Much as I would like to discuss Robert Moses, who tore down a big swath of my neighbourhood and then didn’t even build the promised road!)
Amtrak is in a total no-win situation with the politicians. If it shows signs of making money, well, of course, it doesn’t need us, it should be privatized! And if it needs a subsidy to operate, well you see, it’s worthless anyway, it should be shut down!
But highways, and airports, well, we need them, of course we’ll subsidize them. Well, at least we’ll subsidize big new projects that we can tag with politicians’ names. It’s OK if our existing bridges fall into the rivers, because they already have the names of dead politicians that nobody cares about any more.
I didn’t realize it took that long. I grew up playing there, but it was built not long before I was born, so as far as I was concerned it, like the rest of the world, was always there, frozen in stasis, awaiting my arrival.
Fascinating. Speaking as a right-wing nutjob, I’m glad to see the Other Side can match even nativists (the wrong side of the Right) in wacko conspiracy theories.
Greyhound, Megabus, Boltbus etc can add and adjust routes as needed without needing to wait for someone to build a track or politicians to approve money. They see demand and BAM there’s a bus showing up to whisk people to their destinations. I love Amtrak (Empire Builder ftw) but let’s not neglect the buses. Lots of them now have an electrical outlet for each seat to charge our cell or iPad and free Wi-Fi. The goal is transportation, right? So we should be mode agnostic and not just fixate on trains.
Except it’s not and never has been. Many attempts to create public transit in the post-car era has met with strong opposition from corporations, and guess who often won. Other factors played a role, but to think that corporations weren’t part and parcel of the decline is either myopic or willfully ignorant:
