Word: rails
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...objective profit and loss have suffered too. Airlines explore the temptations of Chapter 11. Amtrak staggers ahead, feckless and insolvent, through train wrecks and slowdowns. It is time to make very large changes--to rearrange the mix of the three basic modes of mass transportation: air, rail and highway...
...answer to the nation's transportation problems clearly lies neither in an expansion of aviation nor in putting more cars on additional highways. My choice would be the oldest mode of the three: rail. It is not a sentimental or nostalgic choice. The aviation industry, like the vast infrastructure for cars, is dangerously overbuilt. In recent years aviation has sucked regional boosters into ill-conceived drives for more airports and more flights, even short ones--all at immense expense...
Would it be possible for the U.S., with its great distances, to divide and organize itself for rail? To reinvent its railroads in order to make them fast, efficient and attractive in regional systems, aiming for a European scale and speed and coherence in each region? (For example: Sacramento-San Francisco-Los Angeles-San Diego; Chicago-Milwaukee-Detroit-Cincinnati-Cleveland-Minneapolis; Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington...
...fuel efficient as planes. As things stand, passenger trains receive only 4% as much in federal subsidies as the $13 billion given annually to the airline industry. Highways receive $33 billion in federal funds. Both airlines and highways have dedicated sources of federal funding: gasoline and ticket taxes. Rail systems should receive equivalent sources of income...
...halfhearted, partly realized plan will only validate the criticisms and doom the new railroads. What is needed is leadership of the kind that Charles de Gaulle demonstrated in backing France's immensely successful high-speed rail, and vision on the scale of President Eisenhower's push for the interstate highway system. The 21st century paradox is that it is not railroads that are old-fashioned and retrograde but rather those essentially inefficient flying machines...