Two more on passenger choo-choos

I've tried to quit posting about this. But I can't. I just can't.

"China's Great Rail Leap Forward Is Looking More And More Like A Disaster".

"A failure of imagination put Metro on wrong track".

Comments

[rjs]

europe seems to do alright with trains...my nephew spent a couple months over there visiting a dozen countries without a car

[JorgXMcKie]

The Paris-Lyon is on of probably two HSR that "pays for itself." Other rail is highly subsidized. Did your nephew go to any small cities? Or did he visit only large cities in different countries?

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

I liked this from the Barone piece, 'Metro has found the money to meet union demands, but too often it hasn't found funds to keep the system up to date.'

Which can be said about almost every public transit system. Now that they're no longer profit seeking businesses.

I also like Barone's;

'Central planners have trouble envisioning the future and, at least in the case of rail transit planners, have a bias toward recreating the past.

'They love the idea of channeling the masses into central destinations and have had trouble imagining that suburbs developing beyond the leafy residential enclaves of the 1950s. They have been slow to see that airports would be a major destination.'

For more, see The Door's Top 15; 'Did GM destroy urban mass transit in America?'

[kyle8]

If only we would conform! We could all be good little taxpayers, just living in our little flats, eating government cheese, using government health care, using mass transit, and paying our 90% taxes. Then the wonderful, intelligent central planners would have an easier job!