[hammersklavier]

Get back on topic!

Here's the deal: both aviation and high-speed rail suffer from the same problems, i.e., expense of getting the kind of environment needed for the profitable operations built in the first place. Since our policy decisions were to leave the railroads to their own devices while expanding our freeway and airport networks in the '50s (this would have been policy I, too, would have supported at the time, ironically enough) the government was more than willing to pick up the tab for construction and maintenance and only get relatively little quasi-farebox recovery back from it. Even today, trucking companies pay far less to use the road network than they should. Latent subsidies and all that.

But times have changed; our freeway and airport networks are largely built whereas our railroad network has stagnated and even shrunk. Our passenger rail network stinks! This is why outlays for new infrastructure should be directed towards the rail and public transit domains--to again equalize the efficacy of all options of transit.

Policy Wonk: your specious claims about public transit make it very, very difficult for me to listen to you with any credulity. Public transit, too, is part of the whole network of integrated modes of transit that constitute "transit freedom".