Re: things that make you go 'hmmm'
Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2017 5:30 pm
I have spent a fair amount of time in Europe and I have never been tempted to rent a car, and rarely take Taxis. I was just in Amsterdam, staying at a hotel near the airport and going into town on the weekends. A 3 day travel pass was about $27.50 and covered trains, trams and busses. I could get from the airport to downtown in 15-20 minutes, then hop on any of numerous trams or busses to easily get to any location in the city. I'm sure the per-day cost is lower for residents buying monthly passes. From speaking with my team there, very few people have cars. It's kind of like NYC except that the trains are clean and safe.The Annoyed Man wrote:I once rode a TGV train from Paris to Angoulȇme in France, a 453 kilometer (281 miles) trip that took not quite two hours, including a couple of short stops along the way to pick up passengers. At top speed, the train was seriously hauling the mail. I mean, like, faster than I've ever driven a car, and almost as fast as I rode my racebike on a closed course racetrack. When our train passed another one just like it heading the opposite direction, the compressed air between the two trains would drive up cabin pressure inside our train enough to make your ears pop. It was awesome.
It also makes perfect sense in France (and maybe the rest of europe), where people have historically always travelled by train. When a city is 281 miles distant, going to an airport, which will be found outside the city you're in, going through security, waiting to board the plane, flying to your destination, and when you get to that airport, finding transportation into that city, can take longer than just going downtown to the train station and boarding the TGV. You can ride the TGV right into the center of your destination city.
But here in the US, for whatever reason, we've never really developed......or maybe it is more accurate to say that we didn't maintain....the infrastructure to take passenger trains everywhere we go, and flying is faster. Plus, we like our cars.
In any case, I can't look at a bullet train for Texas, and not be reminded of all the corruption involved in California's high speed rail boondoggle that has bilked the taxpayers (state and federal) out of nearly $1 BILLION for a section of rail between Madera and Fresno:$35 MILLION per mile!!!!The Perini-Zachary-Parsons bid was the lowest received from the five consortia participating in the bidding process, but “low” is a relative term. The firms bid $985,142,530 to build the wildly anticipated first section of high speed rail track that will tie the megopolis of Madera to the global finance center of Fresno. Do the division, and you find that the low bid came in at a mere $35 million per mile.
And that doesn’t include the cost of rolling stock (that’s engines and cars to the normal among us). Nor does it include the cost of electrifying the route. Does it at least include the cost of land acquisition? No, it does not.
As this fiasco progress, remember that this $35 million per mile represents the best California can do on the section of track the High on Crack Speed Rail Authority selected to go first because it will be the cheapest.When I see stuff like that, it scares me to death that enthusiasm for a Texas bullet train could lead to something like California's experience. I don't trust politicians with that kind of money, for something that has too much potential for being a boondoggle.
I think part of the problem with something like this in the U.S. is the Taxi lobbies that we have in our major cities. They are the reason that the Las Vegas monorail runs up and down the entire strip, but stops within a couple miles of the airport. There is a similar situation in Seattle. We need to have an easy way to get from our airports to the middle of our cities, at a minimum.
IMO, America is all about a money grab and not so much for the "good of the public". but then again, that is part of the American Dream! 