President Joe Biden — perhaps the nation’s biggest Amtrak fan — is set to promote new federal investments for trains on the heavily trafficked Northeast Corridor.
The Democratic president is headed to Bear, Delaware, on Monday to announce more than $16 billion in new funding that will go toward 25 passenger rail projects between Boston and Washington, the White House says. Bear is located about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from Biden’s home of Wilmington.
His remarks will be held at the Amtrak Bear Maintenance Shops, where trains are maintained and repaired. The investments, the White House says, will help trains run faster, cut delays and create union jobs.
Terrible plan. from an expert in rails: https://mastodon.social/users/Alon/statuses/111363609554111161
Expert? He says that those are ‘things that go against future high-speed rail’. There’s no future high-speed rail in USA. Not unless he’s talking about year 5000. Stopping investment because it goes against projects that USA is simply unable to build doesn’t make much sense.
Spending way too much money on projects is why we can’t build. The best thing to do is starve the beasts making money of of way too expensive projects. If the return on investment isn’t good then the smart thing to do is not invest. If Biden wants to support rail (high speed or otherwise) he needs to reform the systems that make costs too high, not keep funding them.
What makes the cost too high?
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Alon who I linked to has done a lot of study on that. I suggest you follow him and his studies.
I don’t have a lot of time to dig through someone’s history, so if you could link directly, that would be great. But thanks.
I do agree that lowering useless governmental barriers to rail would be good for rail, but I also think increased funding would be good.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/ is their blog with many articles over more than a decade. https://transitcosts.com/ is their project website (they works for a university studying transit)