McClatchy: Building a high-speed future: 220 mph, and no pat-downs

[marmar]

Commentary: Building a high-speed future: 220 mph, and no pat-downs
By Curtis Tate | McClatchy Newspapers


This might be the holiday travel season that gets U.S. high-speed rail projects moving.

Faced with invasive airport screenings and traffic-choked highways, Americans may say "enough!" and demand a transportation alternative that's already embraced by America's biggest competitors.

While we're still waiting for construction to begin on the first mile of true high-speed rail in the U.S., other countries aren't sitting still.

China, which recently passed Japan as the world's No. 2 economy, now has the world's fastest trains. By the time it's complete in a decade, China will have invested $300 billion in a 16,000-mile system that operates at speeds up to 220 mph. Despite starting later, China will have a bigger and faster network than France, which ran its first high-speed trains in 1981, and Japan, which has had them since 1964.

Great Britain, the country that invented the railroad, has been slower than its European neighbors to embrace high-speed rail. Now it's planning a 250 mph Y-shaped network that would connect London with Birmingham and eventually northern England and Scotland. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/11/22/103991/commentary-building-a-high-speed.html?storylink=addthis#ixzz16CkgyJip

[Gormy Cuss]

1. No pat downs YET.

As long as the public acts like lemmings on airport security there will be the very real possibility that the practice will be extended to other modes of transport. At the rate we're going, all drivers will be forced to submit to scans before entering certain areas of interest like state capitols and major highways.

[txlibdem]

2. Seriously. I WANT the pat downs or nekkid scanners

I'd love to be as clueless as we were back in the 1950s, too, but the realities of this day are far, far different. We all have rights, yes, but your right to be able to conceal whatever-it-is when boarding a plane, train, bus, horse-cart, etc., does not trump my right to live and be able to keep all my limbs attached.

"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

My only dissatisfaction is in the shoddy level of technology that Americans are able to come up with. We supposedly have the best scientific minds in the world and the best we can do is an x-ray? Puh-lease!

The scanning technology should be multi-spectrum, multi-modal, and be non-invasive, should include both passive and active scanning and be 100% safe. Scanners should be looking for chemical signals in multiple ways, signals and air-borne and whatever else they can come up with that will be able to detect all chemicals on your person, benign or otherwise. Should we be expecting less from the best scientists in the world?!?

Don't get me wrong, I'll temporarily accept what they have but more study is needed and better technology is needed as soon as they can figure out how to make it safe.