There are a few cities
>that grew up before any kind of transport was popular and thus made the
>transition to public transit; but the rest of the US just isn't layed
>out that way.
>
Public transport was pushed, it didn't fall. Most US cities 50 years ago had good public transit. The auto, rubber, and oil companies actually bought them up and in many cases, tore them out, for example, in Detroit. In the 1950s, the federal government made a deliberate decision to put its money into highways rather than trains, and the intercity rail system went the way of municipal public transit. In a few years, it may be entirely gone apart from the Easy Coast corridor, since Amtrak has been put on a self-financing basis. In addition, the vast public subsidies involved in supporting the suburbs, trading farmland for hosuing developments that require auto transit (since we don't emphasize public transit), accelerate the auto-dependence of America. There is nothing "natural" about it. It hasn't to do with the "layout" of the country. Russia, e.g., is vaster, but has (or had) good public transit, good intercity rail transit, and relatively few cars. That was a choice the government made. European countries tend to be in between, even biggish ones like Germany, France, and Spain.
>Patrick mentioned the idea of shifting the highway subsidies from
>trucks back to railroads; Patrick: do you still live in the Bay Area?
>That would be disasterous for the west coast, since the rail lines
>can't handle anything near to what the highways can in terms of
>capacity, speed, and flexibility. If you look at the I-5 corridor
>(roughly Seattle to San Diego, including Portland, Sacramento, San
>Francisco and Los Angeles), you'll mostly see mountains. And 32MPH
>railroad tracks. It's just not the right answer for that kind of
>geography.
>
That's rubbish. You are describing an engineering problem, not a "natural" barrier. Not even an economic barrier: European countries face worse topographical problems are still have real reliance on train transport. Moreover, the objection only goes to intercity transportt and not municipal area transport.
It's rather futile to talk about, since we are not going to get decent train transport, intra- or intercity in this country--rather the reverse--this side of capitalism. But that is not a reason not to chalk up the destruction of public and private rail transport to the downside of capitalism.
--jks _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com