>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.
I did acknowledge it was a half-baked idea. But I'm still not convinced that the balance needs to be anything at all what it currently is, where highway funding is always the #1 solution.
Let's look at the LA-Bay Area corridor, for instance, which is surely the highest volume segment of the I-5 corridor. Not a hell of a lot of mountains there--2 minor passes (minor by Western standards, a qualification I have to make having spent time in the Appalachian mole hills recently...). I doubt those could cost more than a few hours in delivery time, which shouldn't be that big a deal for 80%+ of shipments.
The Redding-Seattle corridor, which is really all that's fairly continuously mountainous in the I-5 corridor, seems to carry primarily lumber based on what I saw when I last drove it about four years ago. Lumber used to be handled along the coast by ships, and still could, or with trains, because speed is just not that big an issue in lumber due to the delays introduced anyway by drying time. So again, a large segment of the shipping traffic need not be done by truck.
On a larger scale, and even accepting your "mountains in the middle" argument, there's still no way an army of trucks could be as efficient as a well-financed rail system for central states shipping and along the eastern corridor, where most of the population & production still are. There's always lots of reasons why current practices are better in the given environment they operate within, but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way.
Patrick