Cactus League Game 17: Reds @ Rockies

Or the new Kroger that’s going be at the Clifton terminus or the large grocery store to be installed at the other end at the Banks.

The truth is, the caveman logic that says train good, car bad isn’t going to persuade anyone.

Mass transit that is poorly planned is more likely than mass transit that makes sense. The objective is, first to make a profit and if you believe otherwise, pay attention to the PACs. That casts doubt on any other common-sense objectives.

and i realize my experience was a small sample size, but even when Amtrak runs on schedule with friendly conductors, it isn’t a great product; especially an Amtrak ticket between Cincinnati and Chicago is $66 and a flight from CVG to O’Hare is $79. Or when driving from Cincinnati to Chicago takes 6 hours, and the train takes 9.

I think this is a lot like National City Lines. If you aren’t familiar in the 30s and 40s several Auto companies, tire companies, and oil companies under the name National City Lines bought urban transportation systems, and ran them into the ground.

They reduced service, reduced stops, made the street cars, buses, etc fail in cities across the country. And as ridership feel off the continued to decrease service, causing ridership to continue to fall off, and than they said, nobody wants to use mass transit when they can buy cars, so they closed most the systems they bought.

I kind of see Amtrak as something similar to that (with less conspiracy), it is so bad nobody wants to use it. It isn’t a practical form of transportation, it is as fast as a bus, and often costs close to a plane ticket.

I would guess he/she needs some sort of DOT blessing.

it should be better funded. The government should realize this is something that is worth losing some money over (i am not joking).

But at the level it is at right now it is pretty useless outside the northeast. They should either fund it properly or not fund it at all. The way they do it now is a waste.

and it was, after all, designed to fail. But I think it’s hard to argue that it’s “mismanaged” in any concrete way. As in, what would you do to improve the current management of Amtrak?

They do a pretty good job of keeping costs down and running a system as efficiently as they can, given that they control almost none of the rails and are forced to run unprofitable routes.

And while I’m making one more train post in a dead thread, I will point out that while the route that Justin took sucks, there are other routes that are done reasonably well in the US. The NE Corridor, obviously, is head and shoulders above the rest, but there is frequent service in California that serves a lot of areas quite well.

And routes in NC and Maine are good examples of what Ohio and Wisconsin should have had: enough startup funding to subsidize the fares so that they’re reasonable (still not much money) boosts ridership enough that they can have frequent service for not much. Sure, both have started with reasonably slow service and made incremental improvements, but both provide valuable services at a fraction of the price of more road building. And both are administered by Amtrak.

But I guess it’s easier to make a blanket statement that Amtrak is mismanaged.

politicians aside, Metra is the outfit that has to approve it. Funding, another matter. Metra doesn’t see a need for it after all this time, guess what?