Why Do Conservatives oppose High Speed Rail?

Just like our InterState freeway system? How about planes, does that hold true for air travel as well?

 

That is entirely different from your previous statement. Private companies own LOTS of railways and trains in this country.

Plead you case with Obama not me. Who has he fired? Who are they suing?

Where does the capitalization to build them come from?

Quite the opposite, the intangibles are not worth the investment as in a highway.

Depends on the infrastructure and some are MUCH more efficient and offer benefit to MUCH more people as in a highway.

The significance is the most efficient means of allocating resources is through the private market, not through politically driven government.

 

Of course it is an entirely new debate as what created the need in the first place and whether Conrail was necessary but moot because it all went back to private and the NE along with the rest of the country has private rail service which for freight operates efficiently but not so for passenger as evidenced by Amtrak which of course does not receive near the funding of other passenger transportation because it is barely a blip on the screen. As it is it is waste of money as in the previous link I posted about how it loses about $10 on every hamburger it sells in the dining car.

And if they foolishly want to do so and the citizens of that state approve so be it.

I have ridden trains in Europe and apples and oranges to here and let's not forget that Europe also relies on an extensive high speed highway system, there seems to be this fallacious belief that Europe relies solely or even mostly on rail.

"Fast, frequent rail service may be a boon to tourists. But it does not play a significant role in overall European travel. Eurostat’s Panorama of Transport says that, as of 2004, rails in the 25-member European Union carried just 5.8% of passenger travel — down from 6.2% in 2000 — while automobiles (including motorcycles) carried 76.0%, up from 75.5% in 2000 (see p. 102).


Italy was the first European country to start high-speed train service, with a 160-mile-per-hour train between Rome and Florence in 1978. France’s TGV began service in 1981. Today, high-speed trains run on more than 3,000 miles of track in Europe. France is the leader: its trains carry 54 percent of Europe’s high-speed rail riders, followed by Germany at 26 percent and Italy at 10 percent. Spain, the U.K., and other countries are all below 5 percent.

At the same time, page 106 of the Panorama of Transport says rail carries only 8.6% of passenger travel in France, with 85% going by car. German rails have 7.1% of the market, with 85% by car; Dutch rails are 8.1%, 84% car; U.K. is 5.5% rail, 87% car, and so forth. Even in Eastern Europe, with the exception of Hungary (where rails have 13% of the market), rails carry only 6 to 8 percent of travel. (These numbers don’t count air travel; adding that reduces rail’s shares even further.)

Regulations set by the European Union are supposed to prevent member states from gaining an unfair advantage over other members by subsidizing their transport networks. Yet most of the capital costs of high-speed rail has been covered by government subsidies, sometimes (as in Japan) in the form of “loans” to the state-owned rail companies that will probably never be repaid.

“Rail is heavily subsidized,” says French economist Rémy Prud’Homme. “Users pay about half the total cost of providing the service.” Prud’Homme estimates that European Union nations give at least 68 billion euros in annual subsidies to their rail systems.

Despite the speed of the trains, the extent of the subsidies, and the punitive taxes on driving, high-speed rail has not reduced highway congestion. “Not a single high-speed track built to date has had any perceptible impact on the road traffic carried by parallel motorways,” says Aria Vatanen, a member of the European Parliament."
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=507

The ones in the sinkholes usually under liberal policies. Just wait and see what is going to happen to NYC.

Actually the free market in it's ever evolving form favors not so cookie cutter developments and more town like open air shopping these days. That is the beauty of the free market, instead of government dictating what we will have the actual consumers do.

Who on earth are you talking about?

ROFL we are FAR from the automobile running it's course.

 

None of the private companies own significant pieces of our public infrastructure, no.

Government ineptitude is bipartisan.

Perhaps you missed my countless posts about how the government doesn't need your tax dollars to do a damn thing.

What the hell? Absolutely they are. You should be thanking infrastructure every day.

How does that matter? All significant infrastructure is public. Roads, trains, AIRPORTS. Your precious airlines don't exist without the PUBLICLY funded airports.

Nope, the private market does not dictate public infrastructure, sorry. It works the other way around.

 

We've got 25 years max left of gasoline automobiles, I can tell you that much.

 

Total expenditures on WPA projects through June 1941, totaled approximately $11.4 billion. Over $4 billion was spent on highway, road, and street projects; more than $1 billion on public buildings, including the iconic Dock Street Theater in Charleston, the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, and the Timberline Lodge on Oregon's Mt. Hood.

More than $1 billion was spent on publicly owned or operated utilities; and another $1 billion on welfare projects, including sewing projects for women, the distribution of surplus commodities and school lunch projects. One construction project was the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, the bridges of which were each designed as architecturally unique. In its eight-year run, the WPA built 325 firehouses and renovated 2,384 of them across the United States. The 20,000 miles of water mains, installed by their hand as well, contributed to increased fire protection across the country.


How about Hoover Dam or Yosemite or Grand Canyon?

 

Economist have shown over and over it did nothing to recover from the Depression just as Obama's stimulus and massive deficit spending has done nothing to get us into a full recovery. And the general welfare, actually the tax and spend clause, concerns the general welfare of the federal government, the United States, and paying it's bills and obligations not the People, the individual citizens.

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We were discussion RAIL and HSR now you conflate ALL infrastructure, go back and respond to what I was actually saying concerning RAIL and HSR.

 

So you polish a million turds and find a few diamonds in the process. It makes for lovely rhetoric, but isn't relevant to the question. How does any of these things make the high speed rail less of a boondoggle?

 

Try more than 40 at the least, indefinite with the new developments in producing hydro carbon fuels.

 

His argument also seems to be that nothing would exist without powerful rulers to make it happen.

 

Yup, the park and hte marina two blocks south of my home was built by the WPA. So was the Post Office ten blocks to the north. A lot of our streets were paved and given curbs by WPA projects. The PWA built the dual highway that goes north and south from here and the bridge that carries it over the Susquehanna River. The PWA aslo replaced the victorian house that served as a hospital with a new purpose built building.

But according to the righties here, none of that should have happened, and that the government investment that paid for it was a drag on capitalism that produced no benefit.....

 

As a business traveller, I never thought of myself as a one of the "privileged few"

I'm sure my fellow passengers will get a kick out of that when I tell them about it tomorrow, as we are all trudge through security, wedge ourselves in our seats and "enjoy" the bus with wings.

Particularly as they can contrast the experience with the possibility of taking a comfortable train, eating a real meal, being able to work the whole time (because we have our phones and internet), and sit in a seat that we can acutually fit in, and arrive at more or less the same time for most medium range destinations.

Yup, we'll all feel "priviledged"!

I marvel at the flat earth types who obviously don't travel, making comments like this. You have no idea at all what you're taking about.

 

How would the private sector be worse off with high speed rail as a part of our Infrastructure?

 

You look at a couple of projects and say "yep, it was all good" and then attack some vague group, as if that proves your assertions.

From an economic stand point, in order to calculate the economic value, one has to take into account the opportunity cost. The government appropriated billions (and don't forget to include the cost of that appropriation) and then doled out a certain amount to a certain program. That program then spent about $11 billion dollars, and some of what it created lasts to this day and has economic value. The objective analysis that a logical (rather than politically biased and irrational) person would ask is, did we get more for that $11 billion (plus the cost of appropriation) than would have been had if it had been left in the hands of the people who produced that wealth in the first place? I submit that the question would be impossible to answer in the affirmative, and it must be assumed to be in the negative. Wealth was lost as soon as it was appropriated, since it wasn't freely given. There was a huge cost in the taking of the wealth through taxation or borrowing. Then there were the many, many things created which have no economic value and may, as with high speed rail, continue to cost taxpayers today.

So, complain all you want about "righties" and "lefties". It sounds good, and you really don't have to think much with that sort of blather.

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They have to subsidize it through the wealth that is looted from them in the form of taxes.

 

Huh? How do you figure that? And even if that were so, HSR wouldn't be the answer.

 

How did that work out for us with freeways and airways?

 

Private highways have existed in the US since 1790. Is it your contention that only government can build and maintain roads? I'd not use that to bolster an argument for high speed rail. Tens of thousands of people are killed every year, and highway maintenance is very expensive. If government is going to build high speed railroads, can we expect a lot of accidents and poor maintenance and high costs?

Since you are in favor of subsidized, (ie. "free") transportation infrastructure for the benefit of commerce, are you also against the tendency of commercial interests to centralize in location far from the customers that they serve? That's the cost of so much "free" infrastructure. It's very inexpensive to outsource your manufacturing and other activities when you don't have to incur all the costs of transport.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Government subsidies distort the market, and your regulations to fix the problems of that distortion create further distortions. At least the politicians get rich, eh?

 

The point is about upgrading our infrastructure to promote the general welfare. High speed rail could engender faster, times to markets, and lower costs to the private sector in that manner.

 

Taxcutter says:
How many business travelers are there? Maybe 0.1% of the population? That fits a definition of "the few."

 

Using air travel alone,

There are an estimated 1.7 million business travelers per day.

That is roughly 1% of the 150 million person labor force.

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Ohh give me a frickin break. Obama hasn't spent anything. MASSIVE is republican rhetoric that is 100% fictitious.

 

So you are arguing that our infrastructure should be private or nonexistent?

I think 99% of the country will disagree with you.

 

OK. 1% get a free ride. 99% gets to pay.

 

Argument ad populum?

 

How much freight could be reaching its destination, in a timelier manner and fashion under our form of Captialism where time is money?

 

Convince me they wouldn't have been built otherwise. And you still have asphalt pavement and curbs in existence from the 1930's? Which streets? Where?