Tom Toles for March 18, 2014

I love it when the ultra conservative on this site keep dissing France. The same France with the fastest, most convenient, and finest public transportation of any civilized country on earth. They are so far ahead of us in this area that we are not even in the race anymore. We do not even seem to have the kind of people anymore that can translate our incredible technological expertise (that placed human beings on the moon, and brought them back safely some 40+ years ago!) into an even reasonable public transportation system. Why, oh why? As a patriotic American that makes me truly sad, truly, truly sad!!

Been saving that up for a while or something?

^He’s on point with the cartoon. The US passenger rail system has so much potential but is being held back. We need it, and we need it to be world class. Not only France but virtually every other wealthy country has superior rail.

Perhaps if rail travel were subsidised to the same level as air travel … who am I kidding? But I can dream, can’t I?

Trains couldn’t compete for the passenger market so they disappeared. No amount of government subsidy today will change how inefficient and under utilized passenger trains are except in very singularly niche markets for commuters..Wishful thinking is not a sound business plan… Except on the Progressive Left.

Commuter train system infrastructure is bought and paid for by the government. Most do not even break even on operating costs. They make sense in high density corridors because of other costs they avoid. Europe has more high density corridors and things are much closer together so you see more trains. It is simple economics. Besides, we can’t even maintain our existing infrastructure.

Poor analogy TTM. Fuel isn’t the only consideration.The bus driver costs money because he or she is paid to drive whereas the car owners are not.The bus is utilized just twice a day, once to take the kids to school, then once to take them home. It sits unused the rest of the time.There is also the idle time at each stop for the bus to consider. The bus also has a far bigger engine to push the weight of the vehicle and load.Then there is the time value of the trip. While in this case it might be low in the case of mass transit it is often high as the persons using it are unproductive and idle for longer periods due to the longer transit times involved.Even in the example given kid number 30 may be looking at an hour or more on that bus to and from school..The result is that much of mass transit is inefficent and costly compared to private vehicles. Hence why it is often under-utilized and operates at a loss.

More to the point, FREIGHT rail is doing OK, is profitable, but passenger rail hasn’t been profitable since the 50’s. That is why Amtrak has taken over passenger service. Without it, there’d be NO passenger rail (outside local commuter rail) anywhere in the US.

Ionizer: Trying to divert attention? SNCF’s TGV is just one example. The German Schnelltrein, Japanese Bullet Train, etc. are equally valid examples. The cartoon showed the US flip side of the coin. As Norman Thomas often said, “I just hope when we have to buy the railroads, they don’t charge too much.” As with health care, the US is the only country in the over-developed world depending totally on private-profit corporations for essential services.

I have this crazy fantasy of a few of our billionaires getting it together and investing their large fortunes into the building of a modern rail system—one that could truly transform this country, and in so many positive ways. But nah, won’t sell with the base, of whom it would best and well serve. Given the problematic return on fossil fuels, it might not turn a profit.

Public transportation success depends on several factors. I used to live in Boston, where it is very practical, and used all day, every day. The main reason it was used is because it’s near impossible to navigate the streets in a car, and parking is almost non-existent. The only value in owning a car in Boston is to leave Boston. To travel within the city means using the T.

People hate buses. They smell, and are much slower than cars due to traffic signals in addition to the stops. Also, a six-lane road with buses becomes a four-lane road, because drivers will stay out of the bus lane, so buses actually impede traffic in lots of instances. People love trains. If the tracks are planned and constructed well, they need not stop at intersections where cars/trucks travel, and can make the trip much faster. This was very evident in Boston, where both types of transportation were available.

Buses are impractical. Only those who really have to ride them, regardless of scheduling inconvenience, ride them. Ridership is therefore low, so the town/city reduces route lengths and numbers, to the point where even the people who depend on them cannot depend on them. This is why public transport relying on buses cannot survive.

Suburban sprawl makes public transportation impractical, but every big city should have a train system accessible from the suburbs, such as the MARTA in Atlanta.

The reasons passenger rail is not utilized are many. Primary is the fact that the tracks were routed through many cities, especially up the east coast, and those cities restrict speed to the point that the advantages of using the system are nullified. Also, the poor quality of the tracks, and our reluctance to fix the tracks, help to reduce maximum speed of transport.

Add some bullet trains, and you might be surprised how many people will choose to take the train instead of the minivan when they go on vacation or to see family out of state. But that would cost money, and we need to save money to go to the next war, and we all know that war is the ONLY monetary outlay that many of our “representatives” believe are worthy.

Ancedote is not evidence Nantucket. I can’t answer your question as I don’t know what the considerations that particular company made on that particular contract.On the whole, mass transit systems lose money. Most hemorrage it in massive red ink. That is why they are heavily subsidized by taxes.

The trip will generally be unproductive. Not everyone can perform useful work while riding mass transit and even when it is possible the system may not be conducive to efficency in doing that work..I also think most people prefer the flexibility private transportation brings. They spend less time on average in transit to and from locations, can more efficently perform many tasks (try buying groceries and riding the bus). On the whole mass transit is very inefficent for most people most of the time. That is why it generally is under utilized and cost ineffective.

The toon illustrates not just passenger rail, but the plight of short line freight lines as well. Thousands of miles of rails have been pulled by the “railroad” companies that received “free” land that they sold the surface, and retained the MINERAL RIGHTS to, where the companies (now OIL companies in effect) were supposed to provide maintenance and rail service, passenger and freight, in perpetuity. They haven’t kept the bargain, many towns no longer have access, but they are profiting from oil and gas sales. TAKE THE RIGHTS BACK, and reduce the national debt instead of providing yachts for CEOs.

Which the REAL problem with rail service, despite the fact as CSX points out, is that while rail is 500 times as effective as trucks, the interstate highway system, trucking companies, OIL companies, and yes, Teamsters Union, did everything possible to kill off rail service. They did their job, for their own interests, just like those “railroad” companies.

Land use planning, as inefficient as in Southern California, with urban sprawl and blight, also took out efficient systems, like the “Red Car” lines, and substituted inefficient freeways and cars, to the pleasure of automakers, and OIL COMPANIES It could have, and should have, been done better!

A co-worker in Portland, Oregon, as one example, long avoided light rail. When he had leg surgery and couldn’t drive for a while, he started taking light rail to commute. He found out it cost him 1/50th the amount of cost for fuel and parking, and SAVED him 45 minutes of travel time, EVERY DAY! He never drove his car to work again.. Mass transit, and light rail, and high speed rail, DO WORK, and almost every country in the world, not just Europe, have long proven it.

Don’t even TRY to compare the fuel efficiency of rail over air travel, and at distances under a few hundred miles, rail is also a TIME saver over air travel!

Only the Greentards care particularly about Gorebal Warming. The rest of us get that while CO2 etc., should be captured to a degree we also recognize that the ONLY cheap non-CO2 producing energy production alternative is nuclear. Moving to nuclear gives us cheap reliable energy that allows us to shift to hydrogen as a portable fuel.Solar and wind are a bust as Germany demonstrates on two levels. First, it is wildly variable in output making it completely unsuitable for base loading. Second it is grossly expensive to the point where electricity is now a luxury good in Germany..The waste can be stored in facilities like Yucca Mountian and if nuclear were widely used I can predict that within 300 years we will have ways to clean and recycle the waste. After all, in the past 300 (1714 to 2014) we went from cutting forests down for energy to nuclear power..As for dangerous, on the whole it isn’t. Fukushima happened as a result of a catastrophic natural disaster. But, it caused no direct deaths and is likely to cause none in the future. Three Mile Island was a worst case scenario for the US nuclear industry and it too caused no deaths or health issues.Chernobyl was a disaster because government ran the system and chose a cheap poor design for the reactor, introduced bureaucratic sloth and corruption in the construction process, and then completely messed up the disaster response. Since no Western nation uses graphite moderated fast fission reactors it is an irrelevancy except in those nations where a Socialist worker’s paradise run by dictators exists..The clean effective alternative is nuclear. Wind and solar are expensive and unworkable solutions.

How would you characterize a group or persons who upon being given factual proof of the incorrectness of their positions on the environment a reaction of dismissal and insult?The Environmental Left today does exactly that. Solar and wind can be demonstrated to be cost ineffective, environmentally unfriendly, and unusable on a large commercial scale. There is irrefutable proof of that.It can be likewise demonstrated that nuclear can be done safely and cost effectively. Other examples are available: The irrelevance of all-electric vehicles and the utility of hydrogen fuel celled ones. Yet, the Environmental Left inisists on subsidizing the electric ones and ignores the hydrogen models.Thus the concatonation of the two words as only someone of severely diminished intellect who is pro-environment would hold positions that are counter productive to cost effective solutions to environmental problems when given those alternatives with credible evidence to support them.

What I am doing in that car is maximizing my time by minimizing my travel time. There are a few places where mass transit is faster than a private vehicle but those are few and far between.The individual vehicle is sufficently often the best choice on the basis of time and effectiveness it is chosen over less useful alternatives..Oh, I don’t own a cell phone myself so I don’t do that when driving. .But, the example holds. One cannot be very productive while walking to a bus stop or light rail station. The productiveness of someone waiting at such a station is highly variable based on weather, station design, time of wait, etc.On the mass transit the same is true. Are you seated or standing? Is there time to do some useful task? Again, highly variable..The problem with public transit is that it is inefficent. It involves considerably more time in many (the vast majority) cases of one’s time and can be so time consuming that it becomes useless on that basis alone..Introducing a red herring of road cost is a fallacy. Highways do not cost thousands of dollars an inch like light rail systems typically do.In any case, I can agree to your terms. Raise gas taxes etc., to completely cover the cost of roads. At the same time raise the fares of mass transit users to make those systems revenue neutral.I’m willing to bet people will choose $8 or $10 a gallon gasoline before they will pay $8 or $10 per bus or light rail ride. It is still cheaper to use the car.The proof of that is Europe and Japan. If it were not true there would be few people buying and owning cars in those places as they have lots of mass transit and the cost of gasoline is $8 to $10 or more, and that is subsidizing mass transit not roads yet people still use their vehicles as much or more than mass transit.

“Make driving more expensive and more people will take public transportation”In DC it cost more to park a car than to take the train in. So I drive to the train station to go a short distance on the rail.

Even before WWII, we Americans fell in love with our automobiles. They represented freedom! We could take pleasure drives, tour the state, the country; with cheap gasoline, we took them out for any errand, or to cruise the Main drag and show off to the girls! After the building of the interstate highway system, we begain to build America around the interstates. Suburban areas mushroomed. Downtowns lost ground to shopping centers. Getting a job 10, 20 or 30 miles from home was no big deal. Industrial Parks grew outside the cities. Today, we are still living in this designed/evolved infrastructure. The price of automobiles, insurance, repairs and gas continue to rise, but wages?: not quite as fast. We lost much of our rail system, and the trollies (which serviced local travel) are long gone. It’s going to take a long time to break our lifelong habits, and expectations. And it will probably cost a great deal of money, development and testing. This is where we could use some real LEADERSHIP from within the inner D.C. belt.

I’m in NY, and recently priced trains to a couple of places. They seem to think they are running airplanes, only they are airplanes that sit on the ground and have long waits between legs of the trip. I should look at the bus rates again — last time I looked, they were trying to price themselves out of the market as well.

Train travel was very nice, compared to the buses I’d been accustomed to riding. Better seats, fewer stops, and better amenities (buy food! walk around!).

It looks like I’ll be driving myself for the foreseeable future. Not the perfect solution, but far more affordable.

Really? Standard Oil and J D Rockafeller was subsidized? Sure…Coal? Same thing. The federal government back then didn’t have the cash to subsidize anything. They did make cash deals in some cases to sell land to these guys at cut rate prices but subsidies? No.AT&T and Bell Telephone did most of their stuff on their own too for the same reason. Where the government “subsidized” them was to pay for them to install equipment for government use.Electricity? Not until the New Deal and projects like the TVA..You are right, government can do things on a scale that private citizens and corporations can’t. But, in the past most of the bigger projects like that had ROI that were positive. Wind and solar have negative ROI..Look at Germany where electricity has become a luxury rather than a staple because of government forced movement to wind and solar. Industry there is buying French and Polish electricty because German sources are too expensive. The German government is building 25 new “clean coal” plants to replace closed nuclear ones and to make up for shortfalls in solar and wind energy production..Solar and wind don’t work and the physics of them make it so they will never work.

@EnokiI’m sorry, but here in germany isn’t electricity so expensive from your view because the Wind- and Solarenergy is so rare. Quite contrary – because it is too much. Our system with the huge ground load is not build for the strong flucuating Wind- and Solarenergy System. Most times we have too much electricity in our net.So the price for electricity at the energy exchange has fallen to nowhere. But our goverment guaranteed high prices for that kind of energy, so they have to increase the energy tax to pay the big power companies the difference.The main problem is to change the energy net in the way that is more compatible to a fluctuating energy system – and if someone invent a big and usable storage in Multi-Megawatt-size for the Wind- and Solarenergy, he will get the nobelprice for that. And the problem with the necessary ground load will be gone too.