Saturday, March 7, 2009

Saturday Night Quick Links

Had a pretty busy last few days and it's been hard to post. Here are some quick links until I get a bit more time.

Dallas officials might stop the future Orange Line short of the airport.
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Should cyclists pay a registration fee? Personally I think absolutely not!
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The Hawaii Senate wants to take from the rail fund to balance the budget. You know, all this stealing from transit to pay for budgets is not cool. Why not take from the road funding? Too much of a sacred cow for you?
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Apparently there is a locomotive buried in Cincinnati. Who knew there were locomotives buried all over the United States like treasure.
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There are a lot of high speed rail concern trolls out there. This one in the Boston Globe.
"We have tremendous distances compared with Japan or Europe," said Carlos Schwantes, a professor of transportation studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "We're just much bigger, and in so much of the country it's so low a population density that we'd have to ask the question: Is it worth spending our dollars for the infrastructure in those areas?"
How many times do we need to kill this argument. There wasn't enough population density in the Roman Empire for paved roads to the British Isles either.
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The Beltline is safe for now.

4 comments:

Randy Simes said...

I can't believe I missed that story about the buried locomotive in Cincinnati. That's pretty close to where I live.

Alon Levy said...

"There wasn't enough population density in the Roman Empire for paved roads to the British Isles either."

Nor were there airplanes to compete with.

Robert said...

Alon:

It may be unreasonable to advocate for a LA-NYC high speed rail at this point due to density concerns. This is not a reason to not pursue a Houston to Dallas link, to no pursue a revitalized Washington, D.C. to not Boston link, to not pursue a system linking California's coastal metropoli.

Michael said...

The density argument is BS. The US has many areas which are sparsely populated - like Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Alaska, and other parts of the Mountain West. Just because there is only 1 person per square mile in these areas doesn't mean that St. Louis to Chicago shouldn't have a rail line that goes 200 mph or so. If Professor Schwantes was just arguing that we should not build HSR in Wyoming - well, I would say that I have to agree with him, although I don't think *anyone* is advocating building HSR in the lowest density places first. All of the HSR line ideas I've seen seem to make a lot of sense.