If we can't afford high-speed rail, how about trying to achieve 1927 standards?

[Karmadillo]

But fixing old stuff is so boring.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/06/too-stupid-to-survive.html

Coming home from the annual meet-up of the New Urbanists, I was already agitated from the shenanigans of United Airlines -- two-hour delay, blown connection -- when I waded into this week's New York Times Sunday Magazine for further evidence that our ruling elites are too stupid to survive (and perhaps the US with them). Exhibit A was the magazine's lead article about California's proposed high-speed rail project by Jon Gertner.

The article began with a description of California's current rail service between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. A commission of nine-year-olds in a place like Germany could run a better system, of course. It's never on schedule. The equipment breaks down incessantly. A substantial leg of the trip requires a transfer to a bus (along with everybody's luggage) with no working toilet. You get the picture: Kazakhstan without the basic competence.

The proposed solution to this is the most expensive public works program in the history of the world, at a time when both the state of California and the US federal government are effectively bankrupt. By the way, I wouldn't argue that California shouldn't have high-speed rail. It might have been nice if, say, in the late 20th century, some far-seeing governor had noticed what was going on in France, Germany, and Spain but, alas.... It would have been nice, too, if the doltish George W. Bush, when addressing extreme airport congestion in 2003, had considered serious upgrades in normal train service between the many US cities 500 miles or so apart. The idea never entered his walnut brain.

The sad truth is it's too late now. But the additional sad truth, at this point, is that Californians (and US public in general) would benefit tremendously from normal rail service on a par with the standards of 1927, when speeds of 100 miles-per-hour were common and the trains ran absolutely on time (and frequently, too) without computers (imagine that !). The tracks are still there, waiting to be fixed. In our current condition of psychotic techno-grandiosity, this is all too hopelessly quaint, not cutting edge enough, pathetically un-"hot." The fact that it is not even considered by the editors of The New York Times, not to mention the governor of California, the President of the United States, and all the agency heads and departmental chiefs and think tank gurus and university engineering professors, is something that will have historians of the future rolling their eyes. But for the moment all it shows is that we are collectively too stupid to survive as an advanced society.

more...

[ibegurpard]

1. makes sense

and a helluva lot more relaxing than the sardine cans and rat-races of air travel.

[Fumesucker]

2. You get the picture: Kazakhstan without the basic competence.

:rofl:

So true..

[Captain Hilts]

3. With dedicated track and more over/under passes, current railstock can really go fast. nt

[FarCenter]

4. I was on an Amtrak train recently that was 4 hours late

It was raining hard. I thought that one advantage of trains over airplanes was that they weren't delayed by the weather.

Wrong!

The track operator had lowered the speed limit to 30 miles per hour due to the rain. This applied to its own freight trains as well as Amtrak passenger trains.

Of course the roadbed was single track anyway, so passenger trains couldn't have passed freights.

Since the local governments charge the railroads property taxes on their tracks, the railroads have ripped up any tracks that they don't absolutely need for freight trains.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. Ya know, Brits complain about their train service, and it is pretty bad

compared to trains on the European continent, and yet, when I was planning to fly to London-Heathrow in 2006 to meet up with a tour group in Hereford, I went onto a frequent flyers' board and asked whether I would be able to make it Hereford by train in the evening if I landed at Heathrow at 11AM.

The participants on the board (who are from all over the world) assured me that I would, because there were trains to Hereford from London Paddington every hour. Hereford is a city of 55,000 on the Welsh border.

Not only that, but there was a 15-minute express train to London Paddington from Heathrow. (However, it has to be one of the most expensive trains per mile in the world. It costs the same as the 70-minute ride from Narita Airport to central Tokyo.)

Oh, and for fans of the British version of The Office, the train to Hereford passes through Slough, which I had thought was fictitious.

[Selatius]

6. Kind of sad that the United States would be forced to accept pre-Great Depression rail standards.

It had so much wealth at its command. In the end, it cut its own throat. Bleeding red ink, it was forced to settle for a rail network straight out of the 1920s. Even the Soviet Union produced a better mass transit grid in its final decades.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. Actually, worse than the 1920s

Not only did we have passenger trains between all major cities, usually several per day, but the mass transit systems were so well developed that it was theoretically possible to go from Cleveland to Chicago by trolley, because each city's system went so far out that it met up with the next city's system.

I can remember taking the train a lot in the 1950s, and even in 1969, taking the train from Minneapolis to Seattle, a bus to Vancouver, across Canada through the Rockies to Winnepeg and then down to Minneapolis from Winnepeg.

Of these routes, only Minneapolis-St. Paul to Seattle is still intact, one train per day in each direction.

[Karmadillo]

8. Taken for a Ride is an interesting account of how GM helped dismantle the trolleys. The link

is: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2486235784907931000

Pretty depressing, though.