Originally Posted by
DryMotorBoatin
This works in Japan and Europe because of geography. I'm not a smart man but I can tell you right now with 99.8% certainty that this has no chance of working. Look at it this way...Any city pair within 3 hours...it'll be faster/cheaper just to drive yourself. Any city pair +5 hours...it'll be faster/not much more expensive to fly. Our population centers are too scattered to make this efficient/time saving.
Yet Amtrak continues to report record ridership numbers: over 28 million in FY2010. And where there is good passenger train service, you'll see that people are indeed riding the train. In 2009, Virginia extended more trains from the Northeast to Lynchburg via Richmond. Ridership jumped almost 150%. In North Carolina, they added a third midday round trip between Raliegh and Charlotte, and ridership jumped 200%!! Amtrak's Acela has over 50% of the market share now between Boston and New York, as well as between New York and Washington. Plus with gas going up and up, driving is not always cheaper, when you consider the cost of owning the car as well. Plus isn't it nice not to drive in traffic, get work done or sleep?
Originally Posted by skidmark
I give up..... Your right we should level the playing field for everyone. Let make sure to hire people from every race, religion, sexual orientation, to operate these trains. We should also allow people to pay for the train ticket according to how much money they make. It's not fair that the guy making 200k pays the same as the guy making 30k. Don't forget international travel, lets make sure we subsidized the ship industry for people who are afraid to fly, but still want to go to Europe. They used to have an infrastructure back when people rode trains.
I think he's more referring to the fact that for the last several decades, highways and aviation have been heavily subsidized while the railroads that almost built their entire networks from private money were nearly put out of business. What do you think happens when you heavily subsidize one of transport that competes with another form of transport and tax them?? Yeah, the taxed one will go out of business, and that's exactly what happened to the railroads. Had we funded all modes on an equal level, we'd probably have privately built HSR today.