Well I agree your letter is expressing your 1st ammendment right, that is very American. I commend you on that. However wasting tax payer money on trains that independent Americans will end up driving themselves UN-American. A family of 4 traveling from New York to Boston will end of driving because it's cheaper and gives them more options. Trains used to be romantic 120 years ago. I will take my Chevrolet.

 

The "free market" can only decide if the playing field is level. The airlines have infrastructure in place. HSR does not.

In a sense, airlines are a form of public transportation.

 

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.

 

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?

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.

 

"In 2004, the Transportation Department evaluated federal transportation subsidies from 1990 to 2002. It found passenger rail service had the highest subsidy ($186.35 per thousand passenger-miles) followed by mass transit ($118.26 per thousand miles). By contrast, drivers received no net subsidy; their fuel taxes more than covered federal spending. Subsidies for airline passengers were about $5 per thousand miles traveled."

That means every time Joe Biden goes from Wilmington to Washington (110 miles), we pay about 20 bucks of his fare. If the airlines had that same level of support, on a LGA to LAX flight,
each airline could PAY EVERY passenger about $300!

(2500 miles @ 18.635 cents per mile = $465 minus $165 one way ticket)

 

I propose the government set up a website for those who are interested in HSR to put their personal information on so the government can send them a yearly bill to cover the cost of HSR divided equally among them .
Gets old after a while paying for pie in the sky ideas.

 

In today's Washington Post:

A lost cause: The high-speed rail race

 

A recent World Bank report on high-speed rail systems around the world noted that ridership forecasts rarely materialize and warned that "governments contemplating the benefits of a new high-speed railway, whether procured by public or private or combined public-private project structures, should also contemplate the near-certainty of copious and continuing budget support for the debt."

That's certainly what happened in Japan, where only a single bullet-train line, between Japan and Osaka, breaks even; it's what happened in France, where only the Paris-Lyon line is in the black. Taiwan tried a privately financed system, but it ended up losing so much money that the government had to bail it out in 2009.

 

I don't know of very many Interstate highways that make a profit either, but I guess that is okay.

 

Had you read my other quote....


... you would have seen that according to the DOT (the federal agency who doles out the money), taxes levied on drivers generate more money than is spent.

Sorry if that bursts your bubble, but facts is facts.