The Oil Drum

There was a time when Iowa had a network of self powered passenger rail cars which connected the many small towns and villages with nearby cities. The last one shut down in the early 1960s as better roads and more reliable autos became affordable.

Look at California with over 40 million people (including illegals) and condsider their traffic congestion problems. California needs dozens of rail transit lines beyond the few systems that are now running and well patronized.

Well patronized or not, San Diego has cut back service on their trolley system recently due to lack of funds and, for the line in question, lack of riders at night (which was the service that was cut.)

California is right now in a state funds crises, which will find its way into the local mass transportation budgets.

LA is of course the poster child for automobile inspired development, yet gasoline @$3.5/gal is not such a big deal when a dumpy old house costs $500,000. Will an effective rail system ever be built in the greater LA area, as a peak-oil adaptation strategy? I doubt it.

Well, yes, point taken - technically, on the heavy lines as opposed to small trams, one might have contact with a surly strike-prone conductor rather than driver. But the lingering memories are still of the New York subway strikes, and WNEW-TV running hidden camera footage of nothing much besides card games going on at the maintenance shops, and seeing subway cars traveling the NY Thruway on truck trailers to go elsewhere get fixed because nothing went on at the shops, and seeing - just recently - a New York City bus on the Indiana Toll Road for the same reason, and after everybody walked to work for days on end, New York mayors caving in and giving 'em everything they wanted and more, and bonuses on top of that. And don't get me started on the antics of William Ronan, or the infamous 7:55 from Babylon, Long Island, that made the news as canceled, most days. In other words, a veritable cesspit of cronyism, incompetence, shiftlessness, sloth, stupidity and corruption.

Oh, and the moronic excuses on the Washington DC Metro over hard-to-get electrical relays, as if the lazy, slothful, dozing supply bureaucracy shouldn't have seen that one coming years in advance. And the perpetual construction and bus bypasses on the Chicago CTA - no project in Chicago ever gets finished, not rail, not highway. And lest one think that fecklessness and utter indiscipline on the part of public agencies and their jobsworth staffs are limited to the USA, consider the fantastic excuses for execrable service from London out to the Cotswolds (British example: "the leaves on the line are 'bigger and juicier' than last year)". So you're right, I'm happy not to be obliged these days to rely every day on these unreliable contraptions; that the problems are entirely sociological rather than technical makes them essentially impossible to fix once they have set in.

And yes, Manhattan and the Chicago Loop are among the few places in the USA that can support rail transit. Perhaps, also, downtown Washington DC and San Francisco. And yet, oddly enough, the Dulles extension has apparently just gone down in flames, although, if I recall correctly, that's where the local highway is so congested that the lights only allow it to be crossed briefly once every twelve minutes (sorry, didn't find a link.) Likewise, Chicago is a solid clot of traffic most rush hours, and yet they have a big project also apparently going down in flames. OTOH, maybe people figure that with a highway they'd at least get an additional connection, something they might actually use.

I think I'll leave the last word to The Onion: Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others, which we might as well treat as if it were a real news report, since the intractable administrative, social and political realities are almost beyond even Onion satire.