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Don't get me wrong; i'm in the "pair of rails" camp, myself. [soapbox] however: joe sixpack understands busses. Not so much trains. when people think of trains in this country, they think of big, smoky, loud monsters that crush unwary cars at intersections because they can't stop, and fall off rails for no reason at all, and explode in a toxic cloud in some suburb somewhere. Not the best PR face, eh? busses don't get the bad (national) press, because they're not as spectacular when they crash. . . . ditto auto crashes. they happen all the time, but we hardly even hear about them unless it's princess DI or a 75 car pileup. . . but ask someone at random if they, or anyone in their circle of freinds, was hurt in a car crash. . . (yes) a bus-related incident. . . . (maybe) a rail accident (probably not) or a airplane-involved situation (not likely at all) also, adding extra capacity to a busway is much easier in the short term than adding capacity to a rail system (take a few busses off other routes) and a busway is a question of maybe a couple of curbs in the center divide of a already existing street. Fast and minimal disruption. fits with the short-sighted way we do things nowadays. and a busway is "safer" in an urban environment because it can stop a little faster, and people are less likely to try and beat a bus at an intersection. so I don't think pollution reduction enters into it, other than reducing the number of private vehicles that travel a given route; too, one bus, with one driver, and no requirement for parking at the terminal qualifies as a capacity enhancement over 30+ private vehicles. as for laying 10 miles of track in 30 years: how many people died each week in the effort to join the nation with rails? how much manpower got thrown at the problem? how much environmental study got done? how much protesting? the country has changed. I agree, thirty years does seem a little extreme, though. seems more like it should take 1 year for the actual construction, and maybe a pair more for the environmental and public comment phases. 40 years ago, we made a national commitment to "land a man on the moon and return him to the earth" in less than 10 years. now? return to the moon by 2020. maybe. if we can come up with a good reason. and no one gets hurt. [sigh] we, as a nation, seem to be convinced that nothing that isn't absolutely safe is worth doing. (and yet we run around in poorly maintained metal boxes at insane speeds, doing our personal hygene and eating lunch while complaining on the phone about gas prices and flipping off other drivers for pulling the same hare-brained manuver that we wanted to try . . . does anyone else see a split personality here?)[banghead] maybe the thing for us railfans to do is to point out how much safer rail travel is than busses and cars, and simultaneously, how much more fun than every other travel method (excepting maybe cruise ships) because passengers can get up and move around, get a snack, meet new people, etc. Oh, and convince our transportation officials to actually spend some serious cash on right of way. . . anyone out there have the numbers as to what gets spent on asphalt vs what gets spent on rails? By the american taxpayer, that is- not by the railroads themselves.
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