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[quote]QUOTE: <i>Originally posted by PNWRMNM</i> <br /><br />We made a political decision to bout $100s of billions into highways. They made a political decision to invest $100's of billions in railroads. <br />[/quote] <br /> <br />Hmmmm, yet another pathetic attempt at history revision by an ilk. Not suprising. <br /> <br />What "we" did was to make a political descision to dump $100's of billions into land grants for proprietary closed access railroads, with the thought that the public would receive certain service guarantees in return. "We" were apparently wrong, because "we" decided we needed something better than private closed access railroads to achieve the necessary public service returns. Subsequently, "we" developed a magnificent Interstate Highway System, paid for mostly through user fees, and through that user fee highway system we have developed into the most prosperous country in the world. We learned a lesson from that first exercise in public transportation development and the subsequent drawbacks it entailed, and used that lesson to develop a much better public transportation conveyance wherein no one company or government agency can exploit or suppress any one user of that system. <br /> <br />From the public service returns perspective, the Interstate Highway System was a much better investment than the original railroad land grants. <br /> <br />The fact that the U.S. with it's lack of HSR passenger systems still manages to have the highest median incomes, lowest average unemployment, and the most optimistic patrons in the world, while the European nations with their myriad of high speed passenger rail systems are struggling with double digit unemployment, low income growth prospects, and rising interracial unrest, perhaps that is a lesson in why it is non-sensical to force public investment in mass transit systems (e.g. forcing non-users to pay for the bulk of the system), especially when individual transit systems seem to get the ravest revues via it's usage numbers.
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