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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
The US has poor rail and public transport systems for one simple reason - Population Density! (or the lack thereof.)
Consider, France has 64 million people in an area the size of Texas. Texas has 23 million or so. Much of the US has similar densities. In addition, Texas cities have no geographic limiting features, so they can sprawl to the populace's content. The result is too low of a population density to economically support mass transit. Certain US cities, New York, San Francisco, Boston, ect. have geographic limits which force building upwards, providing the density to support mass transit.
As to rails, well, LA to New York - over 5000 Kms. Dallas to NY - over 3000 Kms., NY to Miami, over 2000 Kms. Flying is so much faster than rails over those kind of distances, that the result is poor rail service. It's a niche market.
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France is significatnly smaller than the US, and the greater distances might effectively make rail travel less efficient for some trajectories (although we do also have a european rail system which allows us to travel all over the continent by train ; the farthest i've travelled by rail is to Prague, which is an overnight trip, and don't forget the grand tradition of the Orient Express linking Paris to Vienna and Istanbul. oh, and the Eurostar, which connect paris to london via a tunnel under the Channel (they tried to call it "the Chunnel" but the consensus was that that sounds stupid)).
however population density (or lack of it) would seem to me an argument in *favor* of a train system, since you could connect cities without having to make frequent stops. in france, we have about 2 to 3 times the population of texas in the same surface area, but around 20% of that is concentrated in the Paris area, with the overwhelming majority of the rest being empty countryside.
trains are perfect to connect all these isolated cities.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor514ce
National government exists for a reason, and one of those reasons, I posit, should be to overcome the barriers, and in some cases the desires, of local government. Government also exists to provide what's need that private enterprise cannot effectively provide. I've been called everything from a communists to a Nazi for proposing this, but the US needs to nationalize the transportation system. We already have an "interstate" road system. We need an interstate rail system, and nationalized air travel. Airlines have proven they cannot operate efficiently. Time for the big bad Government to step in.
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i agree, especially since as i understand it the MAIN reason you don't have any kind of efficient public transport system is because the automobile industry made sure of that, including going so far as to buy the transport company in question and then close it... (see the no-longer-in-existence "Red Cars" in Los Angeles*), so as to be absolutely certain that you would buy more cars.
*EDIT : apparently this was not only the case in Los Angles : see
the Great American Streetcar Scandal :
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The Great American Streetcar Scandal[1] was the acquisition of streetcar systems throughout the United States, dismantling, and replacement with buses in the mid 20th century by the National City Lines (NCL) holding company, formed by General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum. It is alleged that NCL's companies had an ulterior motive in their purchase of streetcar systems of forcing mass use of the automobile among the U.S. population.
Convicted of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, GM was fined $5,000 and each executive was ordered to pay a fine of $1 for a conspiracy to force the streetcar systems to buy GM buses instead of other buses (but not for dismantling the streetcar systems, which were also being dismantled by non-NCL owned systems).
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