Why not invest in national train transportation from east to west coast in the U.S. like for example europe?
I just finished watching ABC world news and an entrepreneur thought about carpooling from town to town with ppl you meet virtually through Facebook etc. and have the same destinations, he called it Zimride. Zimride is suppose to help with cost of transportation and with the filling of all those empty seats in most Americans cars cutting pollution numerously. So if ppl are personally taking measures like these wouldn’t mean the government should step in and help develop an easier cheaper transportation method like that of the train/subways. So Would it bring the U.S. deeper into dept or would it help in long term environmental and transportation issues?
It’s a nice idea on paper, but train travel is not popular in the US except in the northeast where major cities are relatively close together.
One issue is geography. The US is far larger than Europe. You can get to many cities in Europe within hours by train. By the time that you factor in airport security and check-in times, trains are often competitive with airlines and sometimes they’re faster. In the US, train trips can take days due to the distance. Few people have that kind of time.
The other is economics. Amtrak has been losing boatloads of money for decades due to lack of ridership, even with a limited route system. (The main exception is the Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Washington corridor where short distances and air traffic delays make trains a viable alternative.) If you expand the route system in the absence of customer demand, you simply rack up far bigger losses.
Subways would be a huge advantage in big cities, especially with the cost of gasoline these days. Unfortunately, they are incredibly expensive to build. Will Americans be willing to pay the higher taxes that will be required to build them? Probably not. Washington has been in tax-cut mode for years. We can’t even afford to maintain our roads or keep the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis from falling down. We haven’t got billions of dollars to build these systems without driving the national debt to truly horrific levels and I don’t believe that American voters or politicians will support higher taxes- however socially beneficial subways may be.
I completely agree with you that a good train system like western Europe’s would help the environment, reduce dependency on foreign oil, reduce traffic congestion, and reduce the cost of building and maintaining highways – IF people would use it. However, we haven’t in the past and there are no signs that it is going to change anytime soon.
As I said, it’s a nice idea on paper. However, it’s not quite that easy in the real world.
