Don't get me wrong, I love trains, I'm a train buff from way back. But, it's hard for any kind of train to compete with the car. Acela takes 4 hours on the Boston-New York run. I can drive it in that time. If I drive, I have the car at the far end, I don't have to rent one. Even with $4 a gallon gas, I can get my Mercury LE down and back for less than an Acela round trip ticket. If I have to pay Hertz or Avis as well as Amtrak, no contest.
And this is on the densely populated BosWash corridor, the one location in the US where high speed rail might be able to compete with cars. Once you talk about long trips (coast to coast) everybody is going to fly. You can fly Boston to LA and arrive LA by noon LA time. A one day trip. By train or car, it's a five day trip (one way). Nobody is going to mess around with trains, no matter how fast and how plush for coast to coast.
So why is Obama so into high speed rail? Does he really think it makes any kind of economic or ecological sense? Surely he isn't that dumb? Or is he?
1 comment:
Sorry, David. He is that dumb.
Either that or beholden to the environmental wing of the Democrat party. You know the ones I'm talking about: the car haters.
I don't know if they hate the idea of everyone driving their own conveyances or the freedom to go where they want when they want without the need to use transportation the environmentalists have decided is better for us. Maybe it's both.
But unless they can come up with trains that are faster then driving or flying within a certain distance, cars will almost always win out. (I wouldn't mind being able to get from Boston to Washington DC in three hours by high-speed train, but we won't be building anything capable of achieving such speeds any time soon even though the technology to do so exists. Plus, it will probably cost too darn much!)
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