53 Billion more for railway projects

[Green Maned Lion]

True, to most of us here, but it sure gets "lapped up" by an awful lot of voters.

An awful lot of people are extremely stupid. And an awful lot of people who aren't extremely stupid, but only mildly so, like most people, find that summoning up the effort to go vote when it makes very little difference if one person does or doesn't to be a waste of their time. So the vote is made the quarter million people in this country with functioning brains, and about a hundred million freakin' idiots. There is no other plausible explanation for the kind of people that get into office.

Whenever somebody makes ridiculous sounding derogations in their speech, such as "Soviet-style", they make themselves sound like a peerless idiot.

John Mica may sound like an idiot but I think he knows his audience better than we do. Take a look at Florida's 7th district and you'll see who the real idiots are. <_<

John Mica might look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot.. but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.

 

[George Harris]

The Federal DOT's List of Designated HSR Corridors, cover something like 34 states already. That would be 68 out of 100 Senators, if things were as simple as that.
mind you having a 3 tiered plan makes a lot of sense anyway, Senators or not. It would be kind of silly to have HSR corridors with nothing connecting them to secondary population centers other than roads.

Thi is an incredibly disconnected map in every sense of the word. It is a compilation of the dreams of various pressure groups, not the result of an analysis of real potential traffic.

Some weirdities: gap between Jacksonville and Orlando. Gap between Pittsburg and Cleveland. Gap between Buffalo and Cleveland. Gap Pittsburg - Columbus - Indianapolis - St. Louis. Gap Kansas City - Topeka - Tulsa. Los Angeles to Phoenix and Tucson makes more sense tha LA to Las Vegas. No lines San Antonio - Houston - Dallas/Ft. Worth. Only with these does New Orleans - Houston make sense. Why Dallas - Texarkana - Little Rock? This is not a high traffic corridor. I am sure there are more.

 

[George Harris]

One thing to note is that party affiliation only matters if the representative ONLY votes on the party line. Take for example a republican house member from upper new york state, like Albany. While they are far to the right of a hypothetical NYC house member, they would benefit greatly from HSR connecting their part of the state to the south and would probably support it.
Same in California. The central valley is conservative central. Seriously, the amount of cowboy hats, christian radio stations and tea party membership rivals anything you'll find in texas. But generally, the majority are in favor of HSR because the economic benefits are abundantly clear, especially when looking at the highest unemployment rate in the nation (17.5%).

The biggest problem with HSR overall politically is that way too many people have tried to make it a left-right issue rather than a transportation need issue.

Maybe if it were more clearly presented as a balance of payments issue and reduction of dependence upon imported oil the concept woud become mre generally acceptable. To talk about it as a method of getting people out of their cars is a mistake. That sounds both coercive and as "big brother knows best", particularly when presented by someone that appears to consider everything west of New Jersey and east of California as "flyover" country. Talk about it as improving mobility and providing options. Guess what: There are a lot of places that do not and never have had public transportation where getting out of your car for travel is not an option unless you have a horse or enjoy walking long distances. And: these people do vote.

Do not bring up global warming. Many people consider it a scam invented to make Al Gore and those like him wealthy while impoverishing everybody else. Doing it because it is done in Europe as a justification does not help, either. Many multi generation US people with European ethnic backgrounds feel that the biggest problem with the Atlantic Ocean is that it is not big enough.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

The biggest problem with HSR overall politically is that way too many people have tried to make it a left-right issue rather than a transportation need issue.

I would say the biggest problem with HSR politically is that Obama foolishly admitted he supported it. As if that wasn't bad enough Obama also attempted to improve funding for HSR without first receiving full approval from the minority party. We probably have Biden's big mouth to thank for that enormous blunder.

Do not bring up global warming. Many people consider it a scam invented to make Al Gore and those like him wealthy while impoverishing everybody else. Doing it because it is done in Europe as a justification does not help, either. Many multi generation US people with European ethnic backgrounds feel that the biggest problem with the Atlantic Ocean is that it is not big enough.

Yeah, if we just dumb everything down until it somehow makes sense to xenophobic luddites we'll have this one in the bag. :lol:

 

[Anderson]

Jacksonville-Orlando is the oddest of the bunch there. As much as I hate to say it, I can at least understand the Pittsburgh-Cleveland gap makes sense if you read the history of the corridors: Keystone didn't get extended from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh for a while, and the same can be said of the extensions into Ohio, which weren't on the original map.

More importantly, it's also in a gap of sorts as of now because of awful service times on the Capitol Limited for any non-vampires (anybody up for a nice 2 AM-5 AM trip?). I'd point to the projections for the Lynchburger as evidence of this: There are routes that, if you provide the trains at a decent hour, people will take them. 'course, I don't know what the actual market would look like between Pittsburgh and Cleveland alone...and I would note that any trains running, say, Philadelphia-Cleveland would benefit from improvements on the rest of the route.

The head-scratcher in Jacksonville can probably be blamed on the Southeast Corridor being assembled in so many segments, too, though it seems odd that the FL corridor wasn't just extended north to meet it.

Edit: Though I've never been on the Harrisburg-Pittsburgh segment, I think at least part of the Pittsburgh-Cleveland segment may run into trouble from the mountains. A lot of segments won't get those upgrades because fixing the curves would be astronomically expensive.

 

[jis]

The Federal DOT's List of Designated HSR Corridors, cover something like 34 states already. That would be 68 out of 100 Senators, if things were as simple as that.
mind you having a 3 tiered plan makes a lot of sense anyway, Senators or not. It would be kind of silly to have HSR corridors with nothing connecting them to secondary population centers other than roads.

Thi is an incredibly disconnected map in every sense of the word. It is a compilation of the dreams of various pressure groups, not the result of an analysis of real potential traffic.

I know. It has its weirdness undoubtedly resulting from the political process that went into putting it together. But again purely from the political process perspective, such as it is, one of the first steps of getting grants for HSR is for the corridor to be designated an HSR Corridor. Not saying this is the right way to do things. But at present that is the way it is.

There is another more interesting map that I have come across, that is provided by the USHSRA which can bee seen here. It has an interestingly timeline in 5 year steps.

Even that has some seemingly impractical oddities. Just to take one example, it proposes that there be two totally separate HSR lines, one from Washington DC to Pittsburgh and another from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, i.e. two HSR lines through mountains, when the trans mountain portion could be consolidated into a single segment by doing it in the following three segments, roughly speaking - (i) Washington - Lewistown (vicinity), Philly - Lewistown (vicinity), Lewistown (vicinity) - Pittsburgh, assuming that the Juniata alignment is still the desirable one for HSR. Why would one want to plan two trans mountain segments when one would suffice with relatively small time penalty, beats me.

 

[George Harris]

Do not bring up global warming. Many people consider it a scam invented to make Al Gore and those like him wealthy while impoverishing everybody else. Doing it because it is done in Europe as a justification does not help, either. Many multi generation US people with European ethnic backgrounds feel that the biggest problem with the Atlantic Ocean is that it is not big enough.

Yeah, if we just dumb everything down until it somehow makes sense to xenophobic luddites we'll have this one in the bag. :lol:

By immediately dropping into insults and name-calling you miss my point entirely. The point is the things in the list you copied are completely extraeous to the basic reasons that HSR systems should be built, whick is to fill a real transportation need and to reduce our consumption of oil and other fossil fuels. (That last will only happen if we change the ways we generate electricity.)

 

[Oldsmoboi]

The Federal DOT's List of Designated HSR Corridors, cover something like 34 states already. That would be 68 out of 100 Senators, if things were as simple as that.
mind you having a 3 tiered plan makes a lot of sense anyway, Senators or not. It would be kind of silly to have HSR corridors with nothing connecting them to secondary population centers other than roads.

Thi is an incredibly disconnected map in every sense of the word. It is a compilation of the dreams of various pressure groups, not the result of an analysis of real potential traffic.

I know. It has its weirdness undoubtedly resulting from the political process that went into putting it together. But again purely from the political process perspective, such as it is, one of the first steps of getting grants for HSR is for the corridor to be designated an HSR Corridor. Not saying this is the right way to do things. But at present that is the way it is.

There is another more interesting map that I have come across, that is provided by the USHSRA which can bee seen here. It has an interestingly timeline in 5 year steps.

Even that has some seemingly impractical oddities. Just to take one example, it proposes that there be two totally separate HSR lines, one from Washington DC to Pittsburgh and another from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, i.e. two HSR lines through mountains, when the trans mountain portion could be consolidated into a single segment by doing it in the following three segments, roughly speaking - (i) Washington - Lewistown (vicinity), Philly - Lewistown (vicinity), Lewistown (vicinity) - Pittsburgh, assuming that the Juniata alignment is still the desirable one for HSR. Why would one want to plan two trans mountain segments when one would suffice with relatively small time penalty, beats me.

Cumberland

I would probably run it from DC to Baltimore to Harrisburg and then Harrisburg to Pittsburgh. It would create a very effective high speed triangle between Harrisburg-Philly-Baltimore with connections to DC and NYC over mostly existing track. Adding the high(er) speed connection from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg wouldn't cost as much as a direct WAS-PGH connection and you could start putting in things like Cumberland-Hagerstown- Harrisburg and DC.

It's all about clustering high speed rail in such a way and in such a density that it becomes the more convenient way to travel for most people.

 

[Oldsmoboi]

Do not bring up global warming. Many people consider it a scam invented to make Al Gore and those like him wealthy while impoverishing everybody else. Doing it because it is done in Europe as a justification does not help, either. Many multi generation US people with European ethnic backgrounds feel that the biggest problem with the Atlantic Ocean is that it is not big enough.

Yeah, if we just dumb everything down until it somehow makes sense to xenophobic luddites we'll have this one in the bag. :lol:

By immediately dropping into insults and name-calling you miss my point entirely. The point is the things in the list you copied are completely extraeous to the basic reasons that HSR systems should be built, whick is to fill a real transportation need and to reduce our consumption of oil and other fossil fuels. (That last will only happen if we change the ways we generate electricity.)

Looking at the layout of the interstates and their traffic patterns is a good way to find viable routes. My view is solely from a Pittsburgh perspective, but personal experience suggests Pittsburgh to Columbus is a frequent trip (I70), Pittsburgh to Erie and on to Buffalo is a frequent trip (I79 & I90), Pittsburgh to Cleveland is a frequent trip (I76 to I80 to I480) especially for fliers, Pittsburgh to Harrisburg (I76) is nearly constant as all the local couriers have to drive that for DMV papers.

Not all of these have to be high speed routes doing 160mph. Pittsburgh to Erie is 128 miles. A train traveling at even Keystone speeds would be faster than driving and the terrain allows for a fairly straight shot.

I've done the Pittsburgh - Columbus route many times. It's a booooring drive. It 4 hours of NOTHING yet loaded with cops, so you can't go much more than 70mph. Run the train Pittsburgh to Washington PA to Wheeling WV to Cambridge OH to Zanesville OH to Columbus OH. At 110mph Keystone like speeds, you could run 2 trips each way daily with one set of equipment. Two sets of equipment, 3 departures daily each direction, and you could build up some real critical mass on a route like this.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

By immediately dropping into insults and name-calling you miss my point entirely. The point is the things in the list you copied are completely extraeous to the basic reasons that HSR systems should be built, whick is to fill a real transportation need and to reduce our consumption of oil and other fossil fuels. (That last will only happen if we change the ways we generate electricity.)

George, I don't mind finding common ground with reasonable people. I simply don't believe we live in a reasonable place or time. When I look at the questionable and largely unfounded claims the anti-rail crowd repeats ad nauseum I don't see responsible minds at work; I see raw emotional effluence.

 

[nsker]

I grew up in Russia and rode the Soviet train system long distance many times. I am sorry, but it was way better than Amtrak.