Is Amtrak a classic example of failed big Government Socialism ???

Should ALL roads be toll roads, to pay for themselves ??? And should they be privately owned ???  Will they improve by making money for Wall Street ???

i have no idea sorry

PJS and should libraries being privately owned?  And the police and fire department? 

They dont get it.

Willfully.  There ARE encyclopedias all over the place, and now online for free.  It's easy to learn things these days.

Ah, but go into an innercity library and see how long the wait is for an hour of computer time. Go to a branch in the suburbs and you won't have a wait. There is a growing gap to information access.

We need those socialist libraries more now, but not necesarily for the traditional purpose of checking out books.

I wish the trains would come back I love to travel by train

once again my mind seems to be in it's own little bubble

My last Amtrak ride was dreadful.  The tracks were clogged with other trains, so we always had to wait and wait, and we had to go very slow because they said the tracks were old.  If tracks were built and were kept up with the gusto of roads then would I have had such a slow ride ???

No.

We don't realize how much we've given up to our automobiles.  There is a school of thought that says the two-earner family was made necessary by the cost of keeping a car.  Millions of acres of arable land have been paved, adding to global warming - that land can't be reclaimed.  Once you've compacted the soil that much there's no going back.

Too bad we didn't stick to trains.  Lousy Commies!

Cars caused such horrid urban sprawl, for sure.  It's impossible now to build trains out to where everybody is.  And everybody is now everywhere, and to great environment costs.  But most Republicans have no respect for that (GOD gave us the right to drive over everything - yeee haw) !!!

and in big giant gas guzzling overpriced behemonths that serve no function but to elongate the personals of underconfidenced persons~

Peter, thank you for the article.  It serves to remind folks that there are some services that needed that can't compete under a capitalist model (not that the U.S. has a capitalist model with all the corporate welfare that is given out).  Thank God we have Amtrak! 

I have never traveled by train. I would like to have the experience, but it's much too expensive. I've know a few people who took a trip for the sole purpose of spending a week on a train meeting people and enjoying the scenery.

I would think air travel has also had an impact on train travel. We don't spend time leisurely traveling to a destination. We hurry up and get there so we can frantically enjoy EVERYTHING at that destination before we run back to work. Or we fly there and spend even more miserable hours with family to remind us why we moved 500 miles away from them.

Why haven't we started building bullet trains? If they would connect the 3 major cities in this state by high speed rail, it would boost the economy greatly.

I think our "Socialist" President has mentioned "Socialist" bullet trains.  But Congress will probably call it Socialist (in a serious way).

It's the gas pump for you, it seems, or forget it.

Joe Biden needs to speak up on behalf of train travel! He's used the trains for years to get to and from work.

Wouldn't it be cool to be able to get on a train and travel to a concert or baseball game in another city and make it home in time to go to work late the next morning?

Yep--I do it all the time, although my "travel" is only about 20-30 miles away. I take the Metra to Chicago for $9 round trip--no worries about traffic, about parking($20 is cheap), wear and tear on the car. When I get to the city, I can buy a day pass for the CTA and travel around on busses and the El. I love it.

When I was younger we at least has a half azzed bus system in Joliet. I now live in Yuppieville and there is only one bus that comes anywhere near this city(although the train is literally in my back yard).

If I had my choice, I'd travel by train cross country rather than drive, air or bus. And bullet trains would be fabulous! We are so far behind Europe when it comes to transportations(among other things).

And is it socialist? Well, I think its fascist/feudalistic not to have a good transportation system...so THERE!

I would love to be able to go to Cleveland for a day, visit the R&R HOF and take in a show, then come back home not exhausted from driving.

I drive about 20-30 miles A WEEK to work and activities. I would like to use public transportation, but they suck, especially on weekends. How difficult can it be to run a public system that gets people where they want to go, when they need to go in a timely manner?

I can drive to work in 7 minutes. By bus, that's 30 minutes. I can walk it in 45 minutes and bike it in 20!

Sounds an awful lot like what is happening to the airline industry....

The taxpayer-financed construction of roads had constituted a "hidden" subsidy of the auto and trucking industry for 60 years.   The construction of the Interstate Highway System was initially motivated to provide a means of moving military equipment throughout the country in time of war.  (As a general in WWI, Eisenhauer had been responsible for transporting supplies and thus had firsthand experience with the strategic importance of a decent roads to support an army.)

Those who believe that a gas-tax constitutes a sufficient user fee to justify the heavy reliance on private autos are deceiving themselves, and in a serious way.  Even if we ignore the indirect costs the are incurred by our heavy reliance on the private auto (pollution, noise, destruction of farmlands and wetlands through urban/suburban sprawl, etc.) the combined state and federal gas tax levels barely cover 1/3 of the direct costs of building and maintaining roads.   Guess who makes up the difference?  You and me!  We do so through the taxes we pay to state and federal general revenue funds and through local property taxes.  So when you hear someone complaining about the "subsidized" public mass transit systems, make sure they use the same term for their precious public road and highway system.

The commercial trucking industry has also received a tremendous benefit through this hidden subsidy of the public highway system.  It's easy to demonstrate that rail transport is considerably more efficient to transport freight at distances of more than a few hundred miles, and yet the use of trucks over rail for cross-country freight movement continues to grow, even in this era of "high" fuel costs.   A key reason is that trucking companies don't have to maintain the roads they use, or pay for the cost of constructing those roads.  Railroad companies construct and maintain their rail lines.  Sure, trucks pay taxes on the fuel they use, but there again, the taxes cover only a small portion of the necessary construction and maintenance costs needed to support the trucking industry.

The result of sixty years of distorted pricing and tax policy favoring the automobile and trucking industry over rail and mass transit has put the U.S. at a serious disadvantage in responding to the challenges ahead.  The more efficient development patterns of other countries minimizes their reliance on the private auto as the only means of getting around.

Compared to the 1950's, intercity access to bus and rail transportation has diminished significantly.  The Greyhound Bus service that once served smaller communities has disappeared.  If you live in such a community and become unable to drive your own car, your essentially out of luck.  I have fond memories of riding the train to Milwaukee with my grandmother as a child.  We caught the train in a nearby town, and spent the next 4 hours relaxing as the countryside went by.  My grandmother never had a driver's license during her 100 year lifetime.  I often think about how difficult it would be for her now.

We are a paradoxical society.  We crave independence and the freedom to go where we please when we please.  But our short-sighted pursuit of what we hold as the symbols of that freedom, eventually, over time tends to undercut the very freedom we value.   Perhaps one reason is that we think the downside impacts are only being felt by others, especially when we're able to dismiss those affected as being somehow less worthy of those freedoms in the first place.  The funny thing is, it's only a matter of time before it affects us... but somehow we refuse to see it coming.

But look at what our freeways have done to ship food around quickly.  I saw on the news that most food in India rots and goes to waste because it just sits at the farms. I bet a lot of food problems in the world would be fixed if they could just ship it before it rots.

no to toll and privately owned roads.

The tax on gasoline should be paying for the repairs.

Here in MIssouri, Amtrack comes from Chiago, goes through ST Louis, Jefferson City (our state capitol) to Kansas city and west.

People attending state run committies are encouraged, with peanalities; to use amtrack to go to Jefferson City.