This:
Plus this:
I can see why one should worry.
Hat Tip Jacobos
By Miguel.GFZ
Semi-retired like Vito Corleone before the heart attack. Consiglieri to J.Kb and AWA. I lived in a Gun Control Paradise: It sucked and got people killed. I do believe that Freedom scares the political elites.
Mrrowwww. The claws are out, Miguel.
Well, I believe it was Joe Huffman who said something along the lines of “we never have to worry about the camps because it’s people like us that will be killed in the first night of raids.”
So we got that going for us.
Bullied, broke, bruised, broken, buried and battle-worn.
Pick the outcome.
We all will be one or a combination of these by the time this is all over.
Nous Defions
A little off the topic of the post, but…
High-speed rail works well under four conditions:
1. There are good local connections once you get to where you’re going;
2. It’s reliable, schedule-wise;
3. It’s competitive with other options, e.g. air travel, in terms of the cost/time trade; and
4. The high-speed express trains don’t stop at every little hamlet and village along the way. (Which of course also impacts 3.)
1 is a problem in the US, depending on the city. But 4 will be the killer, I think.
Lots of stops, with associated waits, kills the average speed no matter the top speed. Anyone who’s done interstate road trips with passengers whose bladders are, shall we say, not of size, knows this from first-hand experience.
And why do trains in the US tend to stop at every little village? Well, the representative from Podunk, Rhode Island, say, happens to be on committees which can affect Amtrak’s funding. They don’t stop in his little town, he gets unhappy. He gets unhappy, his committee doesn’t smile upon Amtrak. Repeat many many times, and you get the equivalent of a Ferrari in stop-and-go traffic.
#3 is a problem as well.
Long ago, I thought it would be fun to take the train from the DC area (where we lived at the time) to New Orleans to see the in-laws. It was 24 hours of travel, and $600 more than piling all of us on a plane and flying directly – 2.5 hours. Even with a rental car, it was cheaper to fly.
Cannot imagine what it would be these days.(That was +20 years ago)
I’ve checked a few times the past year for New Mexico to the Midwest and eastern seaboard.
Costs as much as a plane, only a little faster than driving … assuming no schedule slips.
#4 is exactly why it took so long for the DC Metro to get a line out to Dulles. Every neighborhood along the route wanted a stop, and they fought tooth and nail to get one.
What they ended up with is a rail line that happens to include an airport as a stop, not an airport rail. I do not think the Dulles access road has seen one less car.
Yall are gettin senile(yuk yuk!) obammy was bleatin about this way back in 08… it was gonna be great! Ny to LA in 3…….days….maybe.. another expensive liberal pipe dream. I dont know how a train that burns thousands of gallons of diesel and is 3-5 days across country is greener than a jet thats 4-5 hours cross country. I worked for a railroad and you couldnt pay me to ride amtrac. Its YUGELY funded by gubmint money…and it shows. If they want to play choo choo they should update FRIEGHT LINES. Moving frieght across land you cant beat rail
The @atillasaysmeow account no longer exists. Hmmm.
Try again, I also misspelled the name initially 🙂
https://twitter.com/AttilaSaysMeow
Meh, democrats aren’t very good at building trains. 13 years later and california’s hsr project is up to 3 times the original cost and hasn’t completed a single segment. Now they’re begging for the feds to give them more money.
https://kevinmccarthy.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/the-neverending-project-ca-high-speed-rail-and-the-boondoggle-that
Re point 3: a typical airliner goes 550 mph. The fastest train in the world is the Shanghai Maglev, 267 mph. If you exclude Chinese trains (as people who like their necks should do), the top is the Shinkansen in Japan, 224 mph.
So even apart from the issue of too many stops, you’d have to more than double the speed of the fastest train now operating to match that of an ordinary subsonic airliner.
Apart from that, trains are inflexible: they go only where the tracks go, and laying track is extremely expensive and extremely time-consuming. Especially when Democrats run the show because every two-bit activist group gets to file a boatload of lawsuits to stop all progress.
As part of analyzing the Green New Deal proposal to go bit on trains, I analyzed the cost of that. Just returning the rail network to the size it was at its peak (1916) would cost about 22 trillion dollars in construction costs. That would add 100,000 miles to the current amount (140,000 miles) though only about 35,000 miles are currently used to carry passengers and an unknown amount of current track is unsafe at any speed — especially in the Northeast where track maintenance hasn’t been a regular practice for the better part of a century.