[Lingster]

Peggy Noonan has a pertinent column in the Wall St. Journal today: http://online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html

I never fly anymore when I can avoid it.  I'll take the train or drive – I nearly took the bus to Columbus, OH this year for the Arnold but finally decided to fly.  The constant violations, the rituals I'm supposed to know but don't (because I rarely fly anymore) that inevitably wind up earning me a scowl from a 19-year-old rent-a-cop raised to a position of ultimate power.  The whole thing is infuriating and humiliating and I can barely tolerate it without exploding.

So I don't do it.  I abstain from flying whenever possible.  I've probably flown ten times (round trip) in the last six and a half years, when I previously did so ten times every year.

[Lingster]

Yeah, I thought about doing a front page article on it but decided against.  I added him to my watch list, though.

[Lingster]

Another thing no one has mentioned is the way we Americans generally finance infrastructure, which is via 20-year bond obligations.  So the idea of replacing something we're still paying for is a bit of a problem.  It makes much more fiscal sense to do something like this gradually, but the difficulty with that approach is that high speed rail is usually placed as a revolutionary rather than evolutionary change.

One thing that has worked pretty well are 'multimodal' commuter rail/highway corridors, where the rail is in the median of the highway.  Route 66 west of Washington, DC has this feature – aerial photo: http://www.infoi66.com/

[Lingster]

A likable format.

[Lingster]

Just discovered another picture (I think) of this beautiful muscular young lady.

http://good-times.webshots.com/photo/1502995152071783382kNGKKk

I think she is getting bigger if it is infact her.

That's the original one, from maybe three years ago.

[Lingster]

Here's Heinlein on "Rolling Roads": http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=306
And also on "Vacutube" trains: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=371

[Lingster]

I think some Europeans, especially Brits don't really have a concept of just how big and how empty the US really is.

It's important to keep in mind that the distance between London and Baghdad is about 100 miles less than the distance between Los Angeles and Boston.

You're right that Europeans and Brits often seem not to grasp the sheer size of the place.  I suspect that because we have one culture, in their minds they 'shrink' the territory of the U.S. to something more manageable.  The fact is that the island of Great Britain has 1/5th of the population of the U.S. in an area about the same size as Kansas.

I would love it if the U.S. had better passenger trains, but we're heavily invested in highways and airports because that was the best choice 40, 50 and 60 years ago when these decisions were made.  And until there's some revolutionary improvement in transportation technologies, that's what we're gonna be stuck with.

Hell, Robert Heinlein proposed building giant, differential conveyer belt systems, (hundreds of yards wide with portable restaurants and hotels on them) from one end of the country to the other, so that people and freight could get on in one place and then get off at their destination.  Thank God we built the Interstate Highway System before that idea got funding.

[Lingster]

I noticed that, too, but figured it was his evil twin brother "Skippy" that had commented.  😉

Doonesbury reference.  Second offense brings a two week ban.

😉

[Lingster]

I cannot see how a serious Presidential candidate can say such ridiculous things.

He never said it.

The point is that some large cities in the U.S. are very poorly managed.  Boston is poorly managed.  Typically what happens is that Democrats get absolute control of a city's infrastructure to the point where it becomes a one-party municipality.  With no real competition for elected office, the city slowly falls apart as corruption and laziness become the norm.  At some point desperation sets in, a turnaround mayor manages to take over and he brings the place back from the brink.  New York under Giuliani is a good example of the turnaround effect. 

New Orleans managed to dodge the turnaround effect by being so incompetently managed that it was destroyed.

Anyway, there's a reason so many large infrastructure projects are built outside the cities they benefit.  High speed rail would work great outside the cities, but the need to go into them for connections would be fatal to budgets.

[Lingster]

Hi, y'all. Been a while, eh? I wasn't sure I'd ever do any FMG again, but I got a bee in my bonnet a few weeks ago, and this is the result.

I thought you had ossified, sir.

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