1. Yes. Don't be condescending. If you want to engage in a discussion or debate with an exchange of ideas, I'm your huckleberry. I will not be talked at like I am either a child or lacking in higher education. Control your tone, moving forward.
When I use the term rapid transit, I mean fast passenger transportation. I did not say we use our current, but made the suggestion we should upgrade the existing transportation options.
2. Like I said, funding would be both public and private. This can be on a federal level, state level, and city level depending on what is being implemented and who it is serving. Cross country = Federal. Cross state = State. Cross City = City. Public transportation is just like funding other infrastructure like highways, bridges and roads. Large employers would have an investment in this as well in the form of a corporate tax, as this provides them a more diverse workforce that can be brought in from other areas not centrally located to them.
Pubic Transportation infrastructure implementation and upgrades will create jobs and when running, assist the lower income brackets of our
society that may not be able to afford the conversion to electric cars (they can't afford cars now...) and/or create job opportunities they would
not have had w/out pubic transportation options.
3. And those reasons are? Please expound on your statements so that there is something that can be discussed. I'm all for learning which can't be done with blanket statements.
...
My intent was not to be condescending but re-reading it, certainly see how you took it as such. My bad.
To the topic at hand, I’ll address a few of the issues but this post is ultimately going to be much longer than I want.
As I mentioned, outside a few major urban areas, public transit is proven not to be viable. If it were, there’d be private options just as there is with air transportation (in the early days, much of the public transit was actually privately owned). It’s not competitive from a cost or service perspective. Realities of such proposals simply trump the theoretical benefits. Every new rail project is plagued by massive cost overruns and lower than expected ridership, which is really a failure in estimation or a political unwillingness to recognize true cost. It’s actually a pretty disingenuous sales pitch. Ridership cannot sustain the massive operating costs. It requires huge public subsidy because the riders simply wouldn’t be able to afford a ticket if the actual costs were passed on – and still most systems can’t cover it.
Large employers won't contribute additional funding. If we learned one thing the past couple years, it’s that we don’t need to be physically present in large office spaces to be productive. Technology again has proven to be a huge game changer. Moreover, large employers aren’t looking for additional expenditures. They’re looking at tax incentives (read cuts) to locate their business in a given area as a tradeoff for providing a community with jobs.
As mentioned in my previous post, one of the huge challenges of rapid transit is the fact that rail is an archaic concept. Street cars died out for a reason. It’s also why Disney’s monorail of the future never took off. Rail is an inflexible solution. As population centers shift, rail is tied to an incredibly expensive and inflexible route. Express bus routes offer a significantly better solution; they utilize shared infrastructure with routes that are easily changed as demand shifts. Cities on the East Coast were largely built at a time (1800's) when people walked to places or traveled by horse and carriage. They’re more condensed in every way; walk Boston as an example. Most of the country is not like that. Communities were built differently. The area is much more vast. In terms of cross-country travel, I’ve used Amtrak several times. It’s slow and cumbersome, largely because it shares rails with freight. The only option is to have dedicated rail which would be insanely expensive to build with unsustainable ridership levels in the era of air travel. Empire Builder is one of Amtrak's most popular trains with 500K riders annually, yet, they only cover ~65% of it's current operating costs.
Another big challenge is that public transportation is not a point-to-point solution. It can’t be. It only provides a partial solution of delivery to a destination. For some, maybe that’s OK, others not so much. We also live in a society where flexibility is highly valued, again we realized this more with technology the past couple years. Time is money. Speed is life. Even with the best rapid transit solution, riders are still tied to it’s schedule, which may or may not align with their needs.
The subject of public transit also can’t ignore the public safety concerns that come with it as well, especially these days, but that can be an entire topic on it’s own. It does, however, impact ridership, which plays into the overall viability of these solutions.
Again, this was a longer post than I had planned but those are some of the key reasons that outside a few major urban areas these solutions remain unviable...and why I view it as a fantasy.
I may not agree with some of the conclusions of the article but it does a reasonably good job of laying out how we got to where we are:
Why Is American Mass Transit So Bad? It's a Long Story. - Bloomberg
