A road is anything the government designates it as. You've obviously
never stood with a map in your hands vainly trying to find the plainly
marked "improved road", only to be informed that you're standing in the
middle of it.
For the rest you have some points, but most apply to Brittan and few
other places.
Often you make my point for me. Your government owns the trains, which
are an expense, so maintenance is minimal.
In the US road taxes, in the form of gasoline taxes not only pay for
road repair but also subsidize various rail systems, which cannot pay
for themselves out operating revenue.
Bob W wrote:
Roads are cheaper and easier to maintain than railways, starting with
the fact that the minimum standard for a road is a dirt track, the
minimum standard for a railway is damn near the maximum
standard for a
railway.
A dirt track is a dirt track, not a road.
The people who use the roads usually own their own
means of
transport.
Unless a large corporation owns the trains then the
government owns the trains.
In Britain large corporations own the trains and the tracks, and have done
for most of the history of the railways. They were nationalised for about 45
years after WW2 but were consistently starved of funds as a matter of policy
by transport ministers who answered only to the road lobby. The fact that
they survived at all is little short of a miracle.
Anything the government owns is an
operating expense, anything the individuals own is a source
or revenue,
(it can be taxed and the government doesn't have to pay for it's
maintenance).
In Britain the government owns the roads and pays for their maintenance. The
government also subsidises the road haulage industry by not making them pay
taxes commensurate with the amount of damage they inflict on the roads and
the rest of the environment.
Need we go into the fact that Large
corporations can buy
legislatures to get preferential tax treatment, something much harder
for individuals to do?
In Britain that's what the road lobby - the hauliers, petrol companies and
road builders - do. That's why the country is covered with tarmac.
You don't need a road lobby, an enlightened
government will pick roads over rails any time they do a reasonable
analysis.
In Britain the government has never done a reasonable analysis of anything,
least of all transport. The office of the transport minister has a revolving
door. Governments are too focused on the short term economic and electoral
cycles to want to do anything to sort out transport properly.
Then there's the fact that reasonably well off
people seem to
prefer to travel in their own cars, they like privacy, they like to
control their own schedules,
In Britain nobody controls their own transport schedule except pedestrians
and cyclists. Drivers least of all.
they don't want to sit next to this guy
http://www.spock.com/i/H01ljdNSw/The-Scary-Guy.jpg
In Britain we make our own privacy by refusing to acknowledge that other
people are on the same train.
Bob
Bob W wrote:
John,
The arguement breaks down on the cost to build rail
service to every
small town in order to feed the big towns.
Regards, Bob S.
In the mid 60s here there was a wholesale and much-lamented
closure of
small, unprofitable railway lines that linked tiny
communities. Many of them
were turned into walking and cycling tracks through
beautiful and fairly
remote country (but no train to take you there!). My
schoolmates and I
helped with the building of one in Derbyshire called the
Tissington Trail.
The railway station in the town where we boarded was pulled down and
redeveloped as a swimming pool, which was a great
improvement over the awful
unheated outdoor pool we had previously had to use.
If you read literature of the early 20th century you notice
that these small
lines were quite embedded into the social fabric of the
day, even if they
were unprofitable. Some of the stations were built solely
to serve the local
big house, and in PG Wodehouse's books you see Wooster and
Jeeves and the
like making extensive use of them for weekend country house parties.
It's considered to be an inevitable tragedy that so many
were closed,
because of the impact on rural communities, and it's quite
possible that
many of them could have been made payable, or subsidised to
keep them open
for social reasons. The distribution of support for
different transport
schemes has been unfairly loaded in favour of roads for decades.
Most of the lines were probably never profitable even when
they were built.
The early railway boom in this country turned into a bubble
rather like the
dot.com boom. The railway lines were built as vanity or
speculative projects
off the back of inflated share prices. When the bubble
burst a lot of people
lost a lot of money and we were left with a wonderful
infrastructure that
could rarely pay for itself and which was dealt the death
blow after WW1
when road transport came into its own.
I'm still convinced that if the government spent as much
money on the
railways and had the level of commitment to them that they
have now to the
road lobby we would all be a lot better off, and so would
the environment.
Bob
On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 2:08 PM, John Sessoms
<[email protected]> wrote:
From: Bob Sullivan
It's the distance between cities that kills rail here.
Except on the east coast, travel times between big cities
require an
overnight ride.
Planes are so much faster for anything over 200 miles.
Been that way since 1947...
Regards, Bob S.
There are a couple of flaws I find with that argument ...
Who says service has to be only between big cities? Seems
to me local
services are what makes rail transportation viable. Feed
from the small
towns into the big cities and back again; and take the high
speed expresses
between big cities.
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