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.
Justin Schwartz sez:
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.
I sez:
A huge percentage of the volume of containerized trade flows that pass through the major ports of the West Coast (Sea-Tac in the Pac NW, Oak in the Bay Area, LA-LB in the Southland) _already_ reach their destination by means of freight train. Ever since the "double-stack" and "intermodal" technical and organizational revolutions in commercial cargo shipping some 20 or so years ago, big rigs carry less and less overland long-distance freight (i.e. relatively speaking, not absolutely). UP/SP and BNSF run many, many daily freight trains from West Coast ports across the Cascades, the Sierra Nevada, and the Mojave.
The relevant point here is that commercial and industrial capital get top-of-the-line freight rail infrastructure and rolling stock, whereas workers get gridlock and road rage (Jim O'Connor, the original red-green Marxist, made this clear to me). While to some degree this has to do with the shenanigans of the various blocs of capital arrayed around the "auto-industrial complex" -- i.e. energy (oil), intermediate goods (steel, rubber, glass), real estate development (landed property owners, construction contractors, etc.), to some degree it also has to do with the pronounced individualistic/ consumeristic ideologies of the U.S. working class. The destruction of inter-city and intra-city rail transit cannot be explained through the "auto-conspiracy" theory of collaboration among GM, Mack Truck, etc. alone, but must also refer to the historical peculiarity of the U.S. social formation, including the distinctive ideologies of its working class -- including its proclivities for (however illusory) "personal mobility" and (however manufactured by Madison Avenue) "car culture". Fogelson among others has also shown how the working class in LA was already abandoning mass transit in the 20's and 30's, b/c mass transit was run by crooked private monopolies, and b/c automobile travel accorded with its sense of individual independence (however much we might want to chalk this up to "bourgeois ideology").
John Gulick