All Winter we were advised to use public transit to get to work, then were stranded - $590 Million to Increase Speeds by 2.7 MPH

Take the train to work in Manhattan we were advised by the local government suck-up news. Then get stranded.

The Antiplanner :: $590 Million to Increase Speeds by 2.7 MPH :: http://ti.org/antiplanner

Mar 1, 2011

Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood proudly announced Saturday that the BNSF Railway has agreed to increase Portland-Seattle train speeds from their current average of 53.4 mph to 56.1 mph, saving just 10 minutes (3 hours 30 minutes reduced to 3 hours 20 minutes) over the 187-mile trip. This, said LaHood, is “part of the President’s long-term vision to give 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail in the next 25 years.”

...For the record, during daytime hours Horizon Airlines has half-hourly servicebetween Portland and Seattle at a one-way fare of $70 for a 50-minute flight. That’s more than the average fare-plus-subsidy for existing Amtrak trains (about $55 plus some unknown capital costs), but less than half the fare-plus-subsidy for the new riders of the so-called high-speed trains. Greyhound charges about $26 for a 4-hour and 5-minute bus ride. Both of these services are relatively unsubsidized.

The train might be faster than the bus, but absent congestion you can drive from Seattle to Portland in under three hours at a cost (at 35 cents a vehicle mile, which is the average amount Americans spend) of about $60. Divide that by the number of people in your car and you can save lots of money as well as time. Of course, the roads, particularly in Seattle, aren’t uncongested, but we would be a lot better off putting that $600 million into something that would reduce congestion instead of something that takes no more than a few hundreds cars off the road each day.

By the way, George Will opines that “the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.” I strongly suspect that is true for many progressives, but others have their own reasons for supporting high-speed rail, such as overblown concerns about pollution or needless worries about urban sprawl....

[Rear the full article at the above link]

Tzarist Russia, Autria-Hungry, Prussia, Lenin-Stalin-Soviet Union, all controlled the mobility of their "citizens" by having separate train terminals for each outbound destination city. Collectivist control freaks haven't changed.