This page was last updated on September 26, 2019.
Why can’t we do this?; Carl Davidson (KD); Facebook; September 18, 2019.
KD describes himself on Facebook as a “Truthseeker, Changemaker, Student of The Way, Pilgrim on the Road.”
Please read “They know they can’t win if they don’t lie.”
You can learn more about BCR’s leftster management here. “Leftster” is the combination of leftist and gangster, inspired by the left-originated “bankster.”
Below is a review of the subject Facebook post.
KD wrote, “WHY CAN’T WE DO THIS? Good question. I’d love to visit my grandkids (or have them visit me), Pittsburgh to NYC, downtown to downtown, in about three hours. Here’s an idea. Since none of our rail outfits is up to the job, let the Chinese bid on it.”
[RWC] I researched this and found there’s this newfangled thing called an airplane that’s a lot faster than a train. <g>
In case you missed it, KD’s source is People’s Daily Online, an official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.
As I wrote in a previous review,
“We already have high-speed passenger rail service (Acela, run by Amtrak) in the Washington, DC, to Boston corridor. The Boston/Washington run is about seven hours. That’s several hours longer than a plane flight even when you factor in getting to the airport a couple of hours early. On top of that, plane tickets are often cheaper and the planes tend to run more frequently.
“If more ‘high-speed rail lines’ are such a good idea, why aren’t private businesses doing them? The answer is CUSTOMERS. There aren’t enough customers willing to pay the fare required to cover the full cost of service (no subsidies) and/or endure the additional travel time. Throwing money at ‘high-speed rail lines’ would be a case of throwing taxpayer paychecks into yet another bottomless pit, like local mass transit and Amtrak, only with a much larger taxpayer price tag.
“True high-speed rail is practical (read: cost-effective) only when there is large amount of passenger traffic between large population centers in relatively close proximity. It’s the same reason subways make sense only in large cities; they’re enormously expensive and require huge ridership to cover the costs.”
As an engineer (not the locomotive-driver kind), I think building a high-speed passenger rail system would be cool. That said, engineers must take economics into account. It doesn’t matter how much of a technical tour de force a project like this is if it can’t pay for itself. In some areas, it’s considered gauche to ask for a project’s price and how to pay it.
This is where KD trips when he wrote, “Since none of our rail outfits is up to the job, let the Chinese bid on it.” I have no doubt U.S. engineers would blow the doors off the Red China engineers. Heck, we landed man on the Moon in an era where the vast majority of us engineers still used slide rules because computers were still very large, slow, and expensive.
KD concludes with “let the Chinese bid on it.” Why not France or Japan?
Here’s a YouTube video of “Why the US has no high-speed rail.”
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