If you take a look at where Amtrak goes, you’ll see that Pennsylvania does considerably better than average when it comes to commuter trains.
I’ve been waiting for this proposal for a couple of months. There was a guest on Colbert Report – or maybe it was Daily Show, but I think it was Colbert Report – a month or two ago that said that this was coming. I had hopes for something more substantial, though.
Air travel is incredibly wasteful of fuel, and airliners can easily be diverted to attack other targets, as happened on 9/11. Trains can be attacked, but they can’t be used easily as weapons against other targets. That makes them preferable to air travel on both the energy independence and the terror fronts.
A mag-lev train traveling at 250-300 MPH could travel between LA to NY overnight, and when the businessman arrives at his destination, he would be rested and almost immediately productive, instead of being serious jet-lagged, If you designed the system like San Francisco’s modern BART people-movers instead of NYC’s antiquated subway trains, it’d be practical to let companies design their own private cars, such as were sometimes included in 19th-century trains, and building those private cars would be a great start for small manufacturing companies, to rebuild our manufacturing base.
Design the mag-lev vehicles to use GPS and computers for guidance, and you’d eliminate the need for much of the labor needed to operate the individual vehicles.
But $8 billion is a drop in the bucket. Let the federal budget run the mag-lev tracks down the medians of the interstate highway system, and let private enterprise build, own and operate the cars – I’m sure most bus tour companies would come up with innovative coaches – and we could really build a nice industry with lots of new jobs in very little time, that would at the same time make existing American businesses more competitive.
The problem with most government programs is that they are spending money, but if you’re seeing the money come back to you, it can be a sound investment. Sound investments would reduce the need for taxes in the future
