Why Do Conservatives oppose High Speed Rail?

Florida Governor rejects high speed train funding.

Ohio Governor rejects passenger train to connect Ohio cities.

Wisconsin Anti-Train Website

Despite the Federal government giving money to fund these projects, conservatives seem determined to stop them. We are lagging behind the rest of the world. Here is one persons rendition of a hypothetical high speed network for North America:



Opinions?

 

The sheer distances of the US work against high speed passenger rail. The thing will be like Amtrak writ large. A colossal white elephant.

If you want to cut oil consumption it would make a great deal more sense to subsidize electrification of the freight railroad mainlines.

High speed passenger rail is a bad idea and the GOP Governors are wise to reject it.

 

Easy. They oppose it because 'private' entities can't get their hands on the profits. They want 'the action', for themselves, and their minions.

 

Big Government should get all the (imaginary) profit?

 

Two things:

High Speed Rail is a very competitive alternative to air travel in distances of 200-1000 miles.

Amtrak ridership is up, and Amtrak customers pay more of their overall expenses than passenger car drivers do. The average Amtrak customer covers 62% of the total costs, where as a passenger car driver is down to 50%.

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Not everything is for profit. Rail is infrastructure. Infrastructure is crucial to our economy. Neglect only hurts the country, not helps.

 

I don't know about anyone else, but it's my opinion that people aren't interested in taking trains or buses, unless of course, buses are all their budget allows. And trains are very expensive to take.
Well actually, liberals might take a new kind of train since it IS another opportunity for them to feel disconnected and superior to the 'common man'. But I doubt it, even in their case.

Just my opinion. --garnered from observation. Trains and buses are apparently a dying breed, unfortunately.

 

That's ridiculous. Do you know that there are more Democrat millionaires AND billionaires than there are Republican.

I'll bet that Huff Post, MSNBC and Media Matters hasn't reported that to you lately, have they?

Google it, and read more than just liberal responses. Of course, even LIBERAL sources MIGHT tell the truth about it.

--You've just got a crannie up your tranny that you think Repubs are only about money, in love with money and that Dems only want a little money and want minorities to have the rest. (well, unless they're Conservative minority members, of course). Where did you get that? Hm.

 

Subsidizing freight railroad mainline electrification is indeed infrastructure and would bring about measurable benefits.

 

wrong as usual. the reality is that none of these pie in the sky high speed rail projects can get off the ground without funding from the private sector and no one puts up that kind of green without a hefty payout. the reason these fantasies are opposed is that they are simply unworkable. while trains often work well as commuter shuttles in heavily urbanized areas, we are too spread out as a nation for them to serve any other purpose. a quick look at the fiasco in california is enough to turn any thinking person away from the idea of expanding rail service. thanks to the gross incompetence and outright graft inherent in our over-sized government, the price tag for our high speed (to be read low speed) rail from nowhere to nowhere has ballooned beyond the dreams of avarice. as the costs go up the speed goes down and we are stuck with a system that meets none of the criteria upon which the voter approval was originally based.

 

There was a pre-cursor to this, a debate that evoked much the same rhetoric. It was called the SST, or the Super-Sonic Transport.

Boeing had one on the design table, but they never built it because they never got the funding.

Britain and France built theirs, everyone here would know it as the Concord.

For decades we were behind the two of them (and even Russia for a while) in terms of an airliner that could move faster than the speed of sound.

... and we were the bloody geniuses. After 30 years of operation, the Concord never once paid for itself, it was subsidized with tax dollars from start to finish and was shut down a few years back for just that reason.

High-speed rail is no different, it's a gigantic money hole that will not pay for itself, and California going out of its way to complete the project in the most wasteful and expensive manner possible doesn't exactly spur confidence that any Government here would manage it rationally.

 

How is that a reason not to give people the option? What of those who don't have cars?

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Because of fuel costs....

Another attack on government.

High speed rail is a hell of a lot more efficient than the Concorde. That's why it exists in other developed countries.

It is more energy efficient. Also, people forget that most toll-roads paid themself back and are self-sustaining currently.

 

Um, these trains are getting funding from the Fed, not the private sector.

How does government even make its way into this conversation? -________-

 

What else are Republican into besides huge amounts of wealth? Enlighten me.

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Maybe something like the reason that Cons opposed Al Gore's statement that the Arctic ice would be GONE by 2013.

 

I don't know much about republicans, but I do know our rail system is not good enough for the speed trains can go today, not even considering high speed trains.

 

That's asinine. You just want to argue.

 

Yes, yes. Global warming doesn't exist and we could never do anything bad to the planet, (or anybody else for that matter) so long as profit stands to be gained. We know.

 

This is pretty off topic. The Arctic Ice isn't an asset to our future growth as a country. Infrastructure is. Why are conservatives so opposed to infrastructure?

 

Um, and where do you think the Fed gets IT'S money?

(from the private sector. shhhhh....)

 

You could give me an example (but you can't, I understand).

 

i'm really getting sick of this childish line. it's the old "but everybody else is doing it" excuse. it didn't work on your mother and it doesn't work on anyone but the most insecure of fools. take a look at the population densities in those "other developed countries", then take a look at the way our population centers have grown. you won't find a whole lot in common. we've had the room here to spread out and we've done just that. connecting the dots isn't quite so easy when those dots are hundreds of miles apart.

 

Let me explain that which you are too smart to really need to have explained to you, but can't get yourself to realize you're fooling yourself
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Cons oppose both things because it is pretty darn apparent that both things are a very likely unworkable, not-happening kind of idea.

In Gore's case, it is already shown wrong.

Oh, and by the way, losing the Arctic ice would eventually be VERY significant to our country, which is one of the reasons why Democrats were pushing that thought in the first place.

 

It prints it.

 

Clearly it's just to keep poor and black people down. That's the only reason conservatives ever do anything. MSNBC told me so.

 

I get that. The point is how is providing an alternative mode of transportation for our country (and its FUTURE population) a bad thing?

Over 90% of future growth in the United States will be in dense urban areas. It makes sense to connect those urban areas in the most direct, efficient way possible.