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| Re: Port Authority commish wants new bus terminal, not WTC; 7 train to NJ - not dead yet. (1282535) | |||
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Re: Port Authority commish wants new bus terminal, not WTC; 7 train to NJ - not dead yet. |
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Posted by Nilet on Sat Mar 29 11:12:48 2014, in response to Re: Port Authority commish wants new bus terminal, not WTC; 7 train to NJ - not dead yet., posted by Olog-hai on Sat Mar 29 02:53:59 2014. And the absence of big centralized government is not anarchy.The absence of government is anarchy, and you have yet to say that there is any form of government you would approve of. (But then again, you think that somehow Obama is "moderate to far right" on anything.) He is, this fact will be immediately obvious as soon as you crack a dictionary and learn what these words actually mean; as it happens, you currently think "right-wing" means European feudalism. Obviously, Obama does not favour European feudalism; he believes that society ought to be an oligarchy controlled by the rich, he favours the use of torture, perpetual war, and the abolition of privacy as a means of social control, and he opposes any attempt to rein in the unearned power and unearned wealth of the oligarchs as well as any attempt to enforce the citizens' economic rights (ie, the right to food, health care, and housing). All of those are right-wing ideas which are supported by approximately all conservatives and denounced by approximately all liberals. However, as reality is not your forte, you will probably respond with some incoherent drooling, possibly suggesting that Obama must be a liberalsocialistcommunist because he favours the existence of a government as opposed to anarchy or the magical government that you approve of but can't even define. That is exactly what happened from the 60s to the 80s, with the creation of both Amtrak and Conrail, along with other entities such as the MTA, NJ(DO)T and SEPTA. And what was the result?—the greatly-downgraded Crusader came to an end in 1981 or so when Conrail stopped running passenger trains... The Reading went bankrupt in 1971. That the Crusader operated for 10 years after that is sort of a bonus. That's exactly the point I made, and which sailed completely over your head— sure, the government isn't running as much service as the private companies used to, but the private companies went bankrupt. The private companies couldn't run such extensive service; they couldn't run any service at all. Were it not for Amtrak and Conrail, the private railroads would have shut down completely around 1981. The government didn't shut down half the service, they kept half the service running after its operators would have stopped all of it. ... and the city government of Philadelphia replaced Reading Terminal with the CCCT (spelling the end of the SEPTA/former-Conrail diesel services since they weren't re-routed to 30th Street Station). You know, the CCCT was actually an improvement. One of the advantages of government control was that operations could be streamlined for greater efficiency. I don't see why you keep banging on about Reading Terminal, although I suppose foamer fantasies are hardly uncommon on this board. Besides, you think Obama is liberal, so clearly you're not exactly the picture of coherence. By the way, the termination of diesel service had nothing whatsoever to do with the CCCT. After all, the Crusader was cancelled years before it opened. What do you mean "when"? You keep ignoring the reason for the bankruptcy, whatever argument you're trying to make will be as full of holes as Swiss cheese. The reason for the bankruptcy is that passenger services were losing so much money that the railroads couldn't afford to run them. You're the one who's ignoring the reasons— you seem to think that the regulations railroads were subject to since their earliest days somehow spontaneously made their passenger trains start losing money, coincidentally right after the automobile and the commercial airline became commonplace. That's a false scenario. Railroads were not going to shed passenger routes when they can actually make money on them... That's just it. The railroads weren't making money on them. They couldn't make money on them. The only reason they didn't drop all their passenger service by 1965 was because those "regulations" you hate so much told them they couldn't. ...and the reasons they weren't making money on them was regulation, taxation and subsidizing the competition. And there you go with the anarchist bullshit again. Railroads were regulated since the earliest days and they were able to make a profit just fine until cars and planes became common enough and fast enough and cheap enough to make a viable alternative to rail travel. The railroads were taxed for their entire existence, as was every other company; as anyone who doesn't favour anarchy can tell you, taxation has never drove any company out of business ever. And the government never subsidised any competition to the railroads, so you've clearly retreated entirely into your fantasy world where up is left and down is Sunday. BTW, whether you realize it or not, you are validating the existence of the Acela Express in its current form, with the weight of the trainsets, the curtailed active tilt, the slower speeds on Metro-North/ConnDOT, the whole nine yards. Also, were you aware that the federal government was promising 160-mph passenger train operation on the Northeast Corridor 45 years ago? Are you aware that every train faster than the Acela is run by a government? You must know it; you even mentioned it in this very thread. If we had a more liberal government, like most countries in Europe, then we'd have high speed rail like Europe does. Even in its current form, the Acela reaches a top speed of 150 mph in service. The fastest private train in this country was the Metroliner at 125, and even that didn't last very long before the Penn Central begged the government to take it over. |
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