Santiago De Compostella train crash.Follow

I guess splitting all-day parking among 3-4 people works out.

Oh, there are a bunch of them, some of which are more rediculous than others. I've probably heared most of these at one point or another. Please note that this isn't my particular viewpoint on the subject, but just possible arguments:

1. Ticket cost. With very few exceptions, a mass transit system will never fully pay for itself without external subsidies or initial capital investment by ticket sales alone. The problem gets worse the shorter the particular transit segment is for bus systems, and worse the longer the system is for Rail based systems due to maintenance costs on the rails themselves over time and the need for bridges, etc.

2. inter city mass transit is often seen as a magic crazy homeless person teleporter, which is of course the only method a homeless person could travel from one area to another to wreak property crime and threaten the virtue of unsuspecting children. Put one in, and BAM, instant crime wave.

3. Safety. Not so much that a bus or train crash is going to be more dangerous than the average number of car crashes involving that same number of people, but the fact that the injuries and fatalities all occur at once can overwhelm emergancy responders and medical facilities if it were to happen, which is sometimes an argument against rail transit in smaller cities

4. We already have busses, why do we need light rail too (or trams, or BART rail, etc). This one is one of the more utilized ones, often tied to the cost argument. People see the point to point destination, not the overall network tie and less stops and transfers and notice that busses also go the same places that the train is going to go and argue that the additional speed and lack of 3 hours worth of waiting for transfers and whatnot isn't relevant for most riders except for poor people, and they don't count as real people anyways.

5. I saw that batman movie with the impossible water vaporizer thing and don't realize that human blood also contains water in it. Yeah, people have actually used the mass transit mass destruction weapon delivery platform argument and were serious about it.

so yeah, this is why we don't already have a space elevator.

It's a very bad mode of transportation if your point of departure or your destination is not close to a train station.

Yes, yes, I see. This argument of "there aren't enough train stations where I want to go to build a train station near where I want to leave from" is extremely compelling.

And having a train station every 5 miles clearly isn't going to be doable.

I think it depends largely on how much of a barren wasteland you live in. In Iowa, no, not practical. In the Boston/NYC/DC metroplex where all of the people who matter live, it's probably easily doable.

I live in a densely crowded country where every student and many other people use public transport as their main way of moving from one place to another. But as soon as you get out of the big city, public transport gets painfully slow.

Again, the "not enough train stations where I want to go means we shouldn't build train stations where I want to go" argument isn't very compelling. Building infrastructure around existing population density is useful because of utility. Building infrastructure to areas with low population density is useful because it allows greater freedom of movement to the low density area. Suburbs were wilderness before roads were built, etc.

There's quite a difference between outlying communities, and rural areas. New York is well served by having Metro-North all the way up to Dutchess County, and


...okay, ***** you.

AMTRAK, like Rand McNally, seems to have forgotten something.

Edited, Jul 28th 2013 7:05pm by Bijou

In Rome, it's the busses that do you in. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/28/world/europe/italy-bus-crash/?hpt=hp_t4

The thing is, a lot of rural communities already have their towns built around the train tracks - just for freight, not necessarily for people. Adding in commuter rail to some of those corridors, especially the less used ones, will be a heck of a lot easier than built tracks fresh right next to them.

In my town, the infrastructure is already there. We even built our fricking bus station next to the CTX line in anticipation of a possible light commuter rail line to Atlanta. (Hasn't happened yet.)

The rails are certainly here, just no transport for humans. Lotsa freight (grain, lumber and furniture by a large margin).

OK. Not so much furniture as cabinetry.

Edited, Jul 28th 2013 8:20pm by Bijou

I don't know. I have to take a yearly course on human trafficking so it has to be there somewhere.