President Joe Biden — perhaps the nation’s biggest Amtrak fan — is set to promote new federal investments for trains on the heavily trafficked Northeast Corridor.
The Democratic president is headed to Bear, Delaware, on Monday to announce more than $16 billion in new funding that will go toward 25 passenger rail projects between Boston and Washington, the White House says. Bear is located about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from Biden’s home of Wilmington.
His remarks will be held at the Amtrak Bear Maintenance Shops, where trains are maintained and repaired. The investments, the White House says, will help trains run faster, cut delays and create union jobs.
Why is decent rail service, like basic medical care, a contentious issue in the U.S.? Even this article casts shade by saying ‘Bear is located about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from Biden’s home of Wilmington.’ As if having access to public transportation is some kind of left wing elite privelege that no one else can utilize.
Because of capitalism and the US oil and car industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Because conservatives have tricked people into believing that spending money for quality of life improvements is bad.
It cuts into the money we give military contractors.
Genuinely millions of people think the government doing stuff is socialism / communism.
One part of the problem is that Congress has a rural bias, so there are a lot of rural Congresspersons who don’t see the benefit of better rail service so they won’t vote for it.
America is about twice the size of all of Europe. Railroads were controlled by monopoly rich people. Once America became more industrialized, planes became a better cargo transit option. That and the interstate system made trucks an even better economical option. Railroads were not an option as they were expensive and land intensive(which also meant more money for acquiring land)
For medical care, the US government actually spends a bunch on healthcare on par with most other countries. Just that a majority of the monet will go to a bloated medical company into a billionair’s pocket before any of it applies to an individual.
So, extreme capitalism ruined both. Yet we have politicians and people who think we should push further towards a capitalistic way of running things…
Railroads are land intensive but somehow 27 lane highways aren’t? Also wait until you find out how expensive it is to maintain all of those highways…
Railroads have always been business owned. So acquiring land is expensive for them. Highways and interstates are government owned. So they just forced owners to accept the appraised value.
America is about twice the size
I’m going with “size doesn’t matter” here; it’s all politics. On the one hand we have a political requirement that all these long distance routes be kept running, even if they’ll never be viable, never be funded adequately. But on the other hand most of the population is in urban/suburban areas that could be effectively served by good rail service. We don’t have the political will power to create good rail service where it’s most effective, most needed, but we do waste money on bad rail service where it will never be effective
Railroads were not an option as they were expensive and land intensive
I’m not buying this, since the tracks and right of way used to exist. Yes it’s really expensive to acquire now, and that’s going to happen since centers of population change but you can’t use this as an historical reason, because historically we had a lot more train service.
Yeah I’d love to take a train from Ohio to California if it didn’t take longer than the greyhound for more money than a plane ticket. At our size low speed long distance passenger rail is unwanted. But I think a lot of people would be comfortable with a 1-2 hour ride from Cleveland to Chicago and another hour or two to St. Louis, and so on until they’re in California by the end of the day or so. And it should be subsidized to allow it to compete with the heavily subsidized highway and air systems.
Maybe North America but Europe is larger than the US and especially the contiguous US. There are also a shit ton of different countries in Europe which all have different laws and standards which are not easy to work with. They seemed to be able to do just fine. Although they did not cater near as much to auto manufacturers and rip up rail line we did in the US.
As for medical care, the US spends significantly more per person (19% of GDP vs 10-11% for most others) and you are correct that the main reason for that is bloated medical companies.
