I’m really trying to find a conservative blog that doesn’t let ideology trump facts, but it’s tough out there. Today’s example comes from OTB’s Doug Mataconis:
Additionally, as Mitch Berg notes, one wonders if this is really necessary:
Of course, except for the tiny fragment of America living in the congested mid-Atlantic strip, Amtrak is largely on Amerca’s “do not ride” list. Amtrak is an epic money pit.
In vast swathes of the US, terrorists would be the only person on an Amtrak train.
Heh, indeed. […]
It took me two seconds and one click to find Amtrak On Pace to Set All-Time Ridership Record:
Amtrak President and CEO Joe Boardman testified before the House Appropriations Committee last week that with ridership growing more than 36% since 2000, the national passenger railroad company is on pace to break its annual ridership record of 28.7 million passengers, which was set last year. Ridership has not only increased on all three of Amtrak’s major business lines, including the Northeast Corridor, it has grown on most Amtrak train routes across the country, with strong gains in the Southeast, Midwest, and California.
In March, Amtrak had the most riders of any month in their 40 year history. Perhaps they’re a money pit, but their trains are being used across the country. It’s just common sense that higher gas prices and airplane fares will cause people to look for alternatives.
I’m beginning to think that Daniel Larison is the only conservative who doesn’t reflexively “heh, indeed” something just because he wishes it were true.
Update: It’s worth noting that Mataconis updated the post to prove that Amtrak is a boondoggle, but won’t address the fact that people ride it, boondoggle or not:
Apparently neither you nor the humorless poster at Balloon Juice understands the concept of a joke. Nonetheless, you will note the update I posted about just how much of a money losing boondoggle Amtrak actually is.
If Amtrak is a money pit, that’s an excellent argument for cutting off subsidies. But, of course, neither that nor ridership was even the point of the post. So, whatever
In other words, when the facts contradict the shibboleth, print the shibboleth. Nobody rides Amtrak, Amen.
Corner Stone
They all know how to use google, but they automatically filter out any websites that don’t comport to their worldview, ie the ones with actual “facts” inside.
So it’s much easier to just say what you feel like saying than bothering with pre-checking it.
Chris
Give it up, broheim.
Keith
These and no TSA touchy-feely privacy invasions …
cleek
nobody goes to that restaurant anymore, it’s too crowded.
Corner Stone
Ok, didn’t want to lose this in the Obot Orgy thread, but did want to share my wingnut story.
Friend of mine told me he wanted to see how the wingnuts were spinning the OBL event, so he went to our mutual wingnut friend’s house “Wingy” to find out.
Wingy tells him Obama “had absolutely nothing to with it. At all.” and that Obama hadn’t even been told about the operation until the helicopters were hitting the compound. And even at that late point he still “did something to stall them or hold them up”. What, exactly, this stalling method was has been left unclear.
So, one rock solid wingnut myth moving forward will be a semi-military coup where some gung-ho son of a bitch greenlighted this op without ever telling Command.
Villago Delenda Est
Ideology trumps actual facts for all these maggots. They’re as bad in this respect as the most fanatical Soviet ideologue ever was.
EconWatcher
I’ve been looking for one too. Briefly, I thought I’d found one in a blog called Tigerhawk, which seemed at first to attract sane probusiness types.
But then I found myself in an absurd argument in a thread with the frontpager and commenters about who REALLY bears responsiblity for the Iraq War fiasco–GW Bush or the congressional Demoracts who voted to authorize the war in the face of the admin’s claims of WMDs and the general insinuation that anyone who voted nay was an America-hater.
I made what I thought was a completely uncontroversial comment, that the Dems were spineless but of course the President bears primary responsiblity for the war he started. The responses I got were all simultaneously arguing that (1) it was not a fiasco–that’s just the liberal press, and (2) the fiasco was the fault of the Dems who voted to authorize.
Waste of time. You do wonder how people like this could perform in any jobs that require logical thought and weighing of facts.
PurpleGirl
Two years ago a friend visited me in NYC from L.A. The friend flew to NYC but wanted to return with a stop in Indiana to see relatives. That trip was more manageable by train (both time and cost) and when unable to take the first reservation, we were able to cancel it within an hour of the train, get the train fare canceled too and then rebook the trip for later. And there was more leg room to boot.
Trains are nice.
TG Chicago
Did you catch OTB outing the victim’s name in the cheerleader / rape victim story?
Ideological and heartless: great combo!
FlipYrWhig
@EconWatcher: The name sounds familiar… wasn’t “TigerHawk” a PUMA like that “Confluence” person?
Turbulence
The biggest problem with Amtrak in the northeast corridor is that there aren’t enough damn trains (or tracks). The prices are very high (compared to the bus service) and every time I’ve ridden on them, they’ve been packed. The second biggest problem is that Congress worked out a deal years ago whereby freight train companies own the tracks and Amtrak leases space on them, so fast Amtrak trains have to sit behind slow moving freight trains.
mistermix, as for Larison, you may not have been here a year ago or so when we had a great discussion about his thinking on race. The short of it is that he publicly boasts of his membership in the League of the South, which the SPLC has categorized as a hate group and which has leadership that openly advocate for segregation, the subjugation of black folk, the banning of interracial marriage, etc. I can dig up the thread if you like, but Larison is proud to be part of a group of extremely fucked up people and I can’t imagine why anyone who wasn’t a racist would be part of a group like that.
Chris
@Corner Stone:
That myth’s already happened. Too crazy to be openly embraced, but as far as I can tell, wingnuts are settling into the “well yes, he did order it, but he must’ve been real unhappy and reluctant about it” (with the unstated implication that maybe some of those heroic neocons had to push him, eh?)
I do recall that the minute Osama’s death was announced, a wingnut friend of mine posted “I give full credit to President Bush!” Of course, it was done reflexively, before she’d even gotten the script, so a couple of friends immediately went “how? Please, do share with us your insights,” prompting her to take down the status until she could get her talking points down.
She later fell back on the KSM story, which I easily debunked, and left the argument with “well perhaps I misunderstood what I read.”
It really is funny to watch them go into full-blown wingnut mode, desperately seeking ways to make this a Republican victory and not simply an American one.
wobblybits
@Corner Stone: Wow. Well my mind is officially blown.
EconWatcher
@FlipYrWhig:
I don’t think so. Tigerhawk seems to be a New Jersey Republican, somewhat socially liberal, but not a PUMA. Good amateur photographer, who shares some of his pics on the blog.
But just as nuts on foreign policy and general tribalism as the rest of them, it turns out.
MattF
And don’t forget that a large proportion of the winger commentariat is located in DC– so the various ignorable facts are, quite literally, right in front of their lying eyes.
BJonthegrid
My family and I took the Auto Train on Spring Break to Florida. No Airport sized line at check in. We only had to take one over night bag onboard for four people. They took care of the whole family. They had wine and cheese for me, movie night for the kids and a steak dinner for my husband. The accommodations were comfortable. My kids surfed the web and played games until bedtime. The next morning they sent us off well rested with a decent breakfast. We only waited 30 minutes for our car.
I am already planning a trip next year out west. I want my kids to see the Country, not airplane cabins and clouds.
dmsilev
Sheesh. I rode the Empire Builder (Seattle -> Chicago) about a year ago, and the thing was pretty heavily populated across the entire route. Only one train a day in each direction, but plenty of riders at that service level. Some of the stops, there were probably more people on the train than living in the town.
Sure, it’s not the Northeast Corridor with umpteen trains a day, but it works. And man, the scenery can[‘t be beat.
Don K
@EconWatcher:
Funny thing is, in the working world they can be perfectly rational engineers, financial analysts, IT professionals, etc. By that I mean they don’t let conceptions of how the world ought to work get in the way of understanding how it really does work. It’s only when conversations turn to policy and politics that they become completely irrational and dogmatic.
geg6
Unless, of course, it has to do with a woman’s right to choose. Then it “heh, indeedy” with any sort of misogynistic, sexist claptrap anyone can serve up.
Fuck Daniel Larison. He’s proof that even the most “sane” conservatives are fucking assholes who should DIAF.
Edited to add: Oh, and I forgot about how proud he is of his racist heritage. Again, fuck Daniel Larison. Fuck him with a rusty pitchfork.
Chris
@EconWatcher:
In my observation, people who come to conservatism because of a single issue (e.g. “a sane probusiness” outlook) can’t just stay there. The single issue is the gateway drug, but you have to embrace the full spectrum of wingnut views or you’re not one of them – part of the cult-like atmosphere that pervades the GOP.
That, and wingnut agitprop is so out there that just hanging out on their blogs will warp your sense of reality. If a lie’s repeated often enough by enough people, eventually people start treating them as if they have a basis in fact.
MikeBoyScout
Clearly the increase in ridership on Amtrak is due to the Atlas Shrugged (Pt. 1 !!!) phenomenon.
artem1s
trains are lightyears more comfortable than plane travel unless of course you can fly first class. And if the route is direct enough it beats hell out of a day spent in a car, especially if you are driving alone.
Once enough people have experienced it first hand (instead of just buying wingnut talking points) the opposition will die down. And the blind adherence to American car culture has really taken a beating since the bale outs made big Auto THE ENEMY of all good teahaddists.
Of course if the auto industry ever figures out it could be building all those street and rail cars to (re)build a train system west of the mid-Atlantic you can bet corporate enthusiasm will shift dramatically.
RP
Perfect example of “truthiness.” These guys know in their guts that Amtrak sucks and that no one wants to ride it. There’s no point in looking up the “facts.”
Stillwater
@Corner Stone: What, exactly, this stalling method was has been left unclear.
Easy peasy: he ordered a helicopter to crash into the ground or a tree or something. The details are fuzzy.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@Don K: Perhaps its just that they’re assholes, and this “cognitive dissonance” really just gives them cover for exposing their assholishness.
PurpleGirl
@Keith: Apparently there was material found in the OBL raid that indicates ideas about attacks on American trains. Sen. Schumer is now talking about a no-ride list for trains.
http://www.ny1.com/content/138705/city-congressmen-want-bin-laden-bounty-to-aid-9-11-families
From the article at New York 1:
Meanwhile, Senator Charles Schumer pushed for better security on trains, after learning al-Qaida considered attacking U.S. railways on the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks.
He also proposed creating a national “do not ride” list for Amtrak that would be similar to the “no fly” list already used by airlines and airports.
Schumer said more funding is vital to beefing up track inspections and placing more security officers at train stations.
catclub
@EconWatcher: “You do wonder how people like this could perform in any jobs that require logical thought and weighing of facts.”
Luckily, most jobs don’t.
cleek
@geg6:
do you know a lot of people who share your values on every single issue ?
Gozer
@TG Chicago: Wow. The comments to that thread are monstrous. I also love the unquestioning trust in the criminal justice system.
Muley Graves
@geg6: He doesn’t have one. He’s a fucking Yankee, descended from Yankees.
I don’t even know how he got into the League of the South. Apparently they’ll take anyone who shares their goals and mindset, and actual ancestral participation in the Confederacy is not a requirement.
Which I guess then just makes him an asshole.
catclub
@PurpleGirl: Atrios has heaped apropriate scorn on this idiocy.
What is really needed is a ‘do not look at trains’ list.
Might be hard to police. But money for that kind of stuff is free, so no probs.
cleek
@PurpleGirl:
what would work better than a no-ride list is if we had armed guards stationed every 1/4 mile along every bit of track in the country.
that’s 563,000 posts. with 8 hour shifts, that’s 1.5m guards. add another 10% for management and we’re talking serious employment!
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
I find these days as I go through my day I look at all the white men I see (and there are lots) and wonder, “is he a racist asshole? Is he? Is he a misogynistic fuck? Is he a fucking homophobe?”
I don’t like this about myself; but it grows and grows with every day of the administration.
Maybe this is just proof that the real racists are the Negroes.
Corner Stone
@Stillwater:
“Black Jimmy Carter, their helicopters forever crashing.”
mistermix
@geg6: I’m not looking for a best friend or drinking buddy, just someone who can get the vast majority of their facts straight. And Larison does, whether or not he’s some kind of racist.
PurpleGirl
@catclub: I agree it is idiocy. Apparently Schumer does not use Amtrak to get to DC or he’d know what Penn Station is like. I like the trains but Penn Station is a horror to use.
ETA: I had trouble trying to a block quote so I couldn’t add editorial comments on the idea. I think it would be horrible.
cleek: Yes, that would provide a vast number of public service jobs. Now, it they were private jobs….
FlipYrWhig
@EconWatcher: OK, it’s a different Tiger-plus or Something-hawk nym I’m dimly remembering. My mistake.
Gozer
@Don K: Yeah, you still encounter people who complain about young bucks getting welfare despite it being replaced with TANF. When this fact is pointed out they still bleat vague complaints about “someone scamming the system” or completely elide the fact that welfare as popularly imagined hasn’t existed since the mid-90s.
Turbulence
@mistermix: I’m not looking for a best friend or drinking buddy, just someone who can get the vast majority of their facts straight. And Larison does, whether or not he’s some kind of racist.
If the issue was just that he had really bad taste in music or that he enjoyed Michael Bey movies, I’d agree with you. But when people go out of their way to join racist hate groups, and then boast about it, I think that calls their judgment into question.
YMMV.
Stefan
Of course, except for the tiny fragment of America living in the congested mid-Atlantic strip,
The combined population of the Northeastern US, plus Virginia, Delaware and Maryland, is about 70-75 million, or approximately one quarter of the total population of the US. While not everyone in those states lives in the coastal strips, the vast majority do. How are one quarter of all Americans living in a region that includes Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC “a tiny fragment of America”?
qwerty42
@Corner Stone:
Yeah. I just heard that too. I was told it was SecState Clinton, SecDef Gates and Director of Central Intelligence Panetta behind it (and Clinton actually opposed). I suggested this was absurd, the idea that persons at this level would *not* inform the president was just a silly thing to believe, but was assured this was the case. The eagerness to believe nonsensical stuff is disturbing.
jl
In California, you want to go from SF Bay to Sacramento, you take the train if you can. Flying is expensive and an unreasonable hassle for that length of a trip. And as for driving, I got two words of doom for you: Eye Eighty.
Same if you want to go down Central Valley. Flying is even more expensive. Driving is fun if you like driving for hours sandwiched a few feet between big rigs going as fast as they can down the very crowded and unscenic 99. Even more fun in the summer and fall when all the seasonal ag truckers come out to haul tomatoes and such like at break neck speed, ripping their bald tires to shreds. The truck tire shreds along 99 are a kind of regional conceptual art collection by the end of September.
I’ve never understood the conservatie hatred for any and all passenger trains. They have insane rationalizations for why air travel is more ‘free enterprise’ that make no sense to me.
Chris
@Don K:
It’s a lot scarier when you’re talking to people whose jobs do touch on politics.
When someone tells me Saddam had WMDs and they’re hiding in Syria right now, and that someone’s an IT professional, it bothers me, but no more. When I hear the same thing coming from someone on the track to becoming an intelligence analyst, which I have, it scares the piss out of me.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@Turbulence: This, and much quicker than I could have done.
Chris
@qwerty42:
I’m not sure how they think that helps their case. Gates is relatively nonideological guy they usually dismiss as a RINO (as opposed to their great white hope Donald Rumsfeld), Panetta is a Democrat and a Clinton administration veteran, and Hillary Clinton is, well, she’s Hillary Clinton.
If they’re so desperately despising of Obama that they’d rather credit his cabinet than him, fine. Our point – “we got him and you assholes couldn’t” – stands.
Sentient Puddle
Am I the only one who thinks that you’re too fixated on the pine needles in that post? It was just a bloody aside.
jl
Been traveling through Republican territory. And I too have encountered a hard core of Obama haters who give him no credit at all for getting Osama. At first I told myself it was understandable, and wondered how many times I was similarly uncharitable towards Bush II.
But by the time the hard core anti Obama crowd got done thrashing him, I gave up and decided I was never as nasty towards Bush when he had a success. I mean, successes and good decisions under Bush II were very hard to come by, but when he got a truffle, I at least admitted it.
What impressed me the most was the personal nastiness of their criticism. The combo of a non reactionary and non white President has sent a certain segment of the country around the bend and over the cliff, politically.
Thankfully, even in Republican areas, most people gave the dude some credit.
artem1s
speaking of the ‘guts’ argument, I loved what President Obama said in the 60 minutes about going by your guts.
koalaholik
I travel from Denver to Albuquerque to see friends and I would love to take the train. Unfortunately, to do that, I have to take a bus to just north of the New Mexico border, then I can catch a train the rest of the way. Until that
changes, I will continue to drive.
The drive takes 7 to 8 hours, depending on my lead foot. To fly would mean a 1 hour trip to the airport, getting there 2 hours early and about a 1 hour flight, plus having someone pick me up and all the indignity of going through the TSA groping. It is easier to drive and much more enjoyable.
Left Coast Tom
@jl:
Especially when combined with the red pavement from the uncovered loads of tomatoes. And here I thought only water and chicken-feathers were legal litter in California.
flounder
A few years past, one of my uncle-baggers was ranting about how terrible trains were and how they never made money. This was shortly after some 100 billion dollar transportation bill passed Congress, so I asked the uncle how much money the fancy interstates in his sparsely populated neck of the woods, Sheridan-Gillette Wyoming “made”, given that Congress just had to dump a bunch of money into the interstate system and that the “ranchers” that lived along said interstate were exempt from fuel taxes (and sales taxes on farm equipment like brand-new Dodge 2600 diesel trucks) because of cowboy socialism.
Let’s just say that it throat-punched his argument and he found something else to whine about fairly fast.
Stefan
Apparently there was material found in the OBL raid that indicates ideas about attacks on American trains. Sen. Schumer is now talking about a no-ride list for trains.
Jesus, that’s idiotic. What would that do? With a plane, you want to prevent a terrorist from getting on it because a plane in the sky is pretty vulnerable to being hijacked or blown up. But a train on the ground, which runs on fixed tracks, is (a) not really capable of being hijacked and rammed into a building, and (b) much more easily blown up from outside the train via the tracks than from the inside by a passenger. And that’s not even getting into how you’d begin to screen passengers getting onto a train due to the multiple stops and points of entry.
Just another example of a politician reflexively grabbing for the spotlight, too afraid of being seen as weak on an issue to actually think about it.
PeakVT
@Stefan: People only matter when they live in a SFH on an acre or more.
ETA: Any Californians here who support trains should tune into CAHSRblog. The anti-HSR forces are making progress towards crippling the system right now.
Chris
@jl:
There’s no comparison, IMO.
Bush’s approval rating shot up to something like 90% in the weeks after 9/11. That means between sixty and eighty percent of Democrats rallied behind him in the face of a national emergency.
If you can imagine a similar number of Republicans rallying around any Democrat under any circumstance, you’re on drugs. Their hate’s far more widespread and far more deep-seated.
Stillwater
@TG Chicago:
Joyner admits that there was a real victim of a crime here, that the perpetrator at a minimum committed assault, but since he wasn’t yet convicted the school ‘had no choice’ but to continue to let him play on the basketball team. And furthermore, he says (in comments) that since accused/guilty was performing his role as a basketball player playing on the team and she was refusing to perform her role as a cheerleader cheering for him, it was right to kick her off the cheerleading squad. Because ‘the school had no choice’!
Amazing…
ellie
I wish there was a high-speed train from Toledo to Detroit.
brendancalling
that’s been my consistent criticism of conservative “thinkers” for years: they don’t care about facts, so they simply make shit up out of thin air.
that’s embarrassing enough, but it’s the editors that allow it to go on who are just as much, if not more, to blame.
of course we live in a post-truth era, so fact-checking isn’t as necessary.
Cyrus
Well you know, in fairness, look at the actual numbers.
If I’m reading that right, that means that the record is 28.7 million train tickets bought or seats occupied or whatever. There are over 300 million people in the country, and I think it’s safe to assume that most people who take the train ride it to their destination and back (even if they don’t actually buy a round-trip ticket, they have to get back to where they came from somehow), so each individual on the train would count twice.
If I’m right about that, an average of less than five percent of the population actually used a train for one trip last year. (If I’m wrong about my double-counting assumption, that’s still less than 10 percent per year.) That’s really not a lot. A better train system would definitely help, but America also just has a lower population density than most of the rest of the world. I think only nine states have a higher population density than France, and I think France is only around average in the EU, and population density makes a huge difference for the viability of public transportation.
The train system is important and becoming more important as gas prices rise, true. But at the moment it’s still a lot less important than the interstate or metropolitan public transportation (which are also underfunded).
Gregory
Sorry if someone has already pointed this fact out, but air and highway travel is subsidized too, for crying out loud.
Turbulence
@Cyrus: If I’m right about that, an average of less than five percent of the population actually used a train for one trip last year.
The problem with this analysis is that Amtrak is maxed out capacity wise in the northeast. I took the Boston NYC bus a half dozen times last year. I would have much preferred to take Amtrak, even if I had to spend twice as much. Amtrak is just so much more comfortable you can’t even believe it. But I couldn’t because Amtrak tickets cost much more than twice what the bus costs. And that’s the law of supply and demand: the trains are packed and because of stupid freight sharing rules, they can’t add any more trains to the schedule, so they’re going to keep raising the price.
I know a lot of people here that take the bus BOS-NYC bus at least once a year and most of them would love to take Amtrak instead. There’s a huge market just sitting here waiting for Congress to pull its head out of its ass.
slag
I believe the phrase he was looking for was something along the lines of: That was not intended to be a factual statement.
Heh, indeed.
mistermix
@Cyrus: You’re right that a lot of the rural parts of the country aren’t dense enough for good train service. But there are many areas that are dense enough with mediocre train service (upstate/western NY) or none at all (lots of areas are good examples, but let’s take Tucson/Phoenix or FtCollins/Denver/Colorado Springs).
Amtrak is well-used where there are routes to be used, and ridership is growing where ever it is used, so the joke that “nobody rides it” isn’t a joke.
arguingwithsignposts
Perhaps one of these jokers should take a ride on the Chicago to New Orleans line sometime.
Gus
Aren’t jokes supposed to be, you know…funny?
Amanda in the South Bay
1. @mistermix:
That’s some kind of…caveat? Wow.
ETA: I can’t take seriously the kind of people who are apologists for the Confederacy (Larison) even though they sound sane usually on the blogosphere.
Amanda in the South Bay
@jl:
I agree, the Capitol Corridor is a really nice way to get from the Bay to Sac.
Mnemosyne
A major attack at just the right spot could cause serious problems for the country, given how many goods are going by train rather than truck right now due to high gas prices. But screening Amtrak passengers will do approximately jack shit to prevent that, so Schumer needs to drink a big cup of STFU.
evinfuilt
I hear roads don’t make a profit, can we cut off all subsidies to those too?
Heh indeed… indeed
Amanda in the South Bay
@PeakVT:
In CA, the anti-HSR forces are mostly really affluent people who live on the SF Peninsula, mixed in with the usual garbage of central valley Republicans.
Mnemosyne
Also, if someone doesn’t believe that the Republicans have been trying to kill Amtrak for years, look at the long-promised but never built train from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. That would be a guaranteed moneymaker, which is why it’s never been built.
Keith
@PurpleGirl: The only consolation is if all the “Amtrak is un-American” republicans head up the do not ride list.
Stefan
A better train system would definitely help, but America also just has a lower population density than most of the rest of the world.
No, it doesn’t, at least not in the sense as it would relate to building a train network. That’s a bit of a myth which has arisen, for understandable but false reasons. America does have lower population density than other countries if you factor in places like the West and Alaska where no one actually lives — but since no one lives there, we don’t need to run trains there. If you look at those places where people actually live, then the population density is about on line with the rest of the developed world.
Just to take one example, compare Spain, which has been developing a very vibrant high speed rail network, yet its population density is 91.4/km² (229/sq. mile), which is approximately the same as Californiat at with 90.49/km² (234.4/sq mi).
Or contrast France, with a population density of 114/km² (295/sq. mile), to New Jersey, with a population density of 462/km² (1,196/sq. mile), or Germany, at 229/km² (593/sq. mile), to Massachusetts, at 324.1/km² (839.4/sq. mile), and you’ll see that in those areas where people live Americans are often more densely settled than in comparable areas in Europe. Our sense of “density” is skewed because we mentally count all those areas where people don’t live instead of the ones where they actually do.
Pangloss
Air travel is subsidized by the entire cost of the FAA, TSA, and the occaisional airline bailout. Then there’s the cost of federal grants for runway improvement or airport expansion. In my town, I pay approximately $35 a year to an airport authority on my property tax bill for the expansion of the terminal and airport operation— for an airport that only serves 575,000 passengers per year. Meanwhile, the Amtrak station in my town serves 210,000 passengers per year (I’m in the Midwest, not the northeast corridor).
Next time a wingnut talks about Amtrak subsidies, ask them if they know how much they’re paying to maintain an air system.
Stefan
You’re right that a lot of the rural parts of the country aren’t dense enough for good train service.
Which is why no one is actually proposing to run trains out there.
But there are many areas that are dense enough with mediocre train service (upstate/western NY) or none at all (lots of areas are good examples, but let’s take Tucson/Phoenix or FtCollins/Denver/Colorado Springs).
Or the Cleveland-Detroit-Columbus-Cincinatti-Indianopolis-Chicago-Milwaukee-St. Louis-Minneapolis rectangle, or the Los Angeles-San Diego-Las Vegas-Phoenix triangle, or a Vancouver-Seattle-Portland-San Francisco-LA-San Diego line, or New York-Montreal-Boston, etc. etc.
jon
How much of a return on the investment do we get from roads? I’m guessing a lot, though it’s one hell of an investment. The good: people can take their cars anywhere. The bad: they do so in huge amounts, using oil that is getting scarcer and more expensive, and it’s no a sustainable model.
Trains are the future, like it or not. We can pretend otherwise all we want, but that’s our future.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@jl:
Fond memories on being on the El Capital, the train going 60 in that vile Central Valley ground fog drinking, a beer and looking at the cars crawling on 80 thinking “suckers”
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
Been to China in the last year. Rode the train from Shanghai to Huangzhou. Sweet. Fast, quiet, comfortable, cheap.
Been to Germany in the last year. Rode the train from Frankfurt to Cologne. Sweet. Fast, quiet, comfortable, cheap.
Watched an Amtrak train drive by just the other day. Drab. Dirty. Looks like something Dagny Taggart might have owned.
There are times when simply being an American is embarassing.
Anoniminous
Public anything is anathema to Conservatives and public mass-transportation, other than the car/highway system, seems to particularly raise their hackles. To ensure their preferred system is the only system they refuse to allocate funds to mass-transit claiming such things are a boondoggle while ignoring or discounting the hundreds of billions of Public monies that was and is thrown at the car/highway boondoggle.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko:
Well, Acela at least approaches foreign HSR.
ETA: I’m not sure people realize how gigantic the US is compared to many other parts of the world. the Empire Builder, for example, travels 2300 miles from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest. What city is 2300 miles east of Paris, for example? Would a train running from Paris to a point 2300 miles east be all shiny? And lets not forget the US has things like massive deserts and the Rocky Mountains, which make a trans continental HSR/electrified rail problematic from a cost and engineering perspective.
A lot of commuter rail rolling stock is pretty nice-its no HSR, but then again its not supposed to be.
At one time, say prior to World War 2, the US had a ton of electrified interurbans. I don’t think people nowadays can fathom how, in the early 1900s, we had so much electrified rail.
Its depressing, certainly.
Tuffy
I’ll put the Amtrak boondoggle on the table when they put the military-industrial complex boondoggle on the table.
Roger Moore
@Stefan:
Except that those places have Senators who have some say in the way our tax money is spent. Those Senators (R-Bumfuck) will insist that our scarce transportation money should be spent subsidizing rural 2 lane roads that are used by a handful of drivers a day and remote airports that have only a few landings a week rather than trains that transport many times that many people. Somehow the “nobody uses it” argument applies only to trains, not to other forms of transportation.
MTiffany
@Gregory: Dammit all. Beat me too it. But it bears repeating — if that dissembling sack of shit (Mataconis) thinks that Amtrak is a money pit, then what the fuck does he think the interstate highway system is? Oh wait, if Mataconis acknowledged that the interstate highway system is an even larger money pit (a tax payer subsidized money pit, no less) than Amtrak, he wouldn’t be a dissembling sack of shit…
slag
@Anoniminous:
The very definition of fiscal conservatism.
Amanda in the South Bay
The European equivalent of the Empire Builder would be from Paris to…Azerbaijan, I think (just looked at Google Earth). Try running a fancy spic and span HSR train over that route. I guarantee it’d be super expensive, and that’s over more favorable geography than the Rocky Mtns, etc in the US.
Stefan
I’m not sure people realize how gigantic the US is compared to many other parts of the world. the Empire Builder, for example, travels 2300 miles from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest. What city is 2300 miles east of Paris, for example?
2300 miles is about the distance from Madrid to Moscow. Europe’s pretty big too.
Stefan
And lets not forget the US has things like massive deserts and the Rocky Mountains, which make a trans continental HSR/electrified rail problematic from a cost and engineering perspective.
Yes, at least there are no mountains in Europe or mountains or deserts in China, which is why they have HSR and we don’t…
And why are deserts a problem for HSR? Flat, dry land without a lot of buildings…that seem pretty ideal to lay down track.
Tom
Here’s a map of Amtrak services over time
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/10282/the-evolution-of-amtrak-1971-2011/
There are some gaps that should really be filled in. Oklahoma City-Kansas City, LA-Bakersfield, Toronto-Chicago to name a few. (That last one did exist until recently, but closed due to massive border delays post 9/11)
Juicetard (FKA Liberty60)
Why is it that only trains are expected to make a profit?
I mean, how much money did I-95 earn last year? Did it turn a profit? How about Reagan National Airport? Is it a profit center, or operating at a loss? And which Galtian free ennerprise built these things, anyway?
When it comes to things conservatives like- for instance freeways- they forget how much of a massive public investment was, and is, made to operate them, then pretend as if the Federal Interstate Highway System and all the airports and air traffic control towers sprang up as a result of the Magic Invisible Hand.
I had a thought experiment once- what if we reversed the “free” highways and “pay” trains- what if you had to pay a toll everytime you got onto a highway, but all trains and buses were free to ride?
Then what if we consistently invested massive sums of money into aquiring rail rights-of-way, adding lines and service, while neglecting the freeways- when the freeways got potholes, we closed off those lanes, for lack of gummint funds and the needs of auto owners were ignored while complaints about bus service were addresed immediately.
In a few years, as we rode around on high speed trains and shuttle busses, some child would look out at the ragged remains of a freeway system, with snarled traffic jams and wonder why it was so.
Then someone from Reason would chirp brightly that the God of the Market had decreed that rails were efficient, while autos were wasteful and the Natural Selection had caused all this.
Gregory
@MTiffany: Not to mention the massive subsidies for oil, both in the form of direct US government payments — to a mind-bogglingly profitable industry, no less — military interventions in places like Iraq and, of course, maintaining an air traffic control system and airline safety regimen on the public dime.
Tata
At least once a year I talk Amtrak from New Jersey to Providence and a bus to Hyannis to see my grandfather. This, after years of bus/bus or car trips, even planes to Boston/bus to the Cape. The Amtrak/bus ride is by far the best way to make the trip. Turbulence, upthread, seems ambivalent about the Northeast Corridor. I am not.
Stefan
I’m not sure people realize how gigantic the US is compared to many other parts of the world. the Empire Builder, for example, travels 2300 miles from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest. What city is 2300 miles east of Paris, for example?
2300 miles is about the distance from Madrid to Moscow. Europe’s pretty big too.
2300 is also Leningrad to Lisbon.
Roger Moore
@Juicetard (FKA Liberty60):
And there you’re asking about a favorable route. A better question would be how much we’re doing with the low traffic parts of the interstate system. How many people really took I-94 between Billings and Fargo? Is that route paying for itself? How about I-25 between Cheyenne and Buffalo, WY, or I-27 between Lubbock and Amarillo? I’m not saying we don’t need roads in those places, but does the traffic really justify 4 lane, divided, limited access road, or could we get away with a lower construction standard?
Tom Levenson
FWIW, my son and I tootled down to NY on the Acela on Friday. Should have taken about half the time (2 hours instead of 3:40 from Boston), but no worries; good times; no stress for me; Top Gear on the iPad for the boy.
No pair of cities less than 400 miles apart should lack for high speed rail. That we can’t get there is, I guess, an instance of American exceptionalism.
Feh.
(Plus the duck-billed platypus fronts to Japanese bullet trains are teh awesome
Tom Levenson
Also, too. That OTB writer deserves no more consideration than an “You’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny” response.
DFH no.6
@Chris:
I haven’t found this to always be the case, even here in deep-red Maricopa County, AZ.
Two of my bosses, for instance, are Republican primarily (maybe, almost solely) because they (mistakenly) believe the myth that Republicans are better for business. Neither are particularly conservative in most other ways – in fact, they are both fairly liberal socially (not anti-gay, not racist, not misogynist, not into the stupid drug wars, not anti-science – one of them even spent about an hour around a campfire a while back just ripping into one of our colleagues for being anti-evolution).
My own baby brother, however, does fit this “embrace the full wingnut spectrum” motif. His “gateway drug” was the typical “undeserving others – mostly blacks, and around here, Mexicans” were mooching off the government (because Democrats set it up that way). Thus, his hard-earned tax dollars were being unfairly re-distributed to lazy, shiftless ghetto (and barrio) bums. The irony here being his own history of being on AHCCS (AZ’s Medicaid) for a while when he was younger and poor with two young daughters he was raising as a single dad, working since graduating from ASU solely for various government agencies, and of course paying a much lower tuition at said state college due to the major tax subsidy.
He wasn’t like this at the start, but over the years he eventually bought into pretty much the whole enchilada, including becoming anti-gay and even anti-science. I recall looking up at the stars in the night sky with him one time, discussing astronomy in relation to our scientific understanding of the age of the earth, and his retort being along the lines of “we don’t know that any of those lights in the sky are over 6,000 light-years away – there’s no proof that the earth or the universe is any older than Genesis indicates”. This from as lapsed a Catholic as any of us, who hasn’t darkened the door of a church outside weddings and funerals for decades.
But evolution (or anthropogenic climate change, or anything remotely “environmental”) is “liberal”, so he’s agin’ it. For my brother, being Republican truly is tribal, and cult-like.
drkrick
@Stefan:
He’s only counting the Real Americans among them. It’s a much smaller number.
Corner Stone
One of the arguments I see against rail is the “all or none” varietal.
“Why should we spend taxpayer dollars for them folks to have rail when we can’t equitably provide rail for all?”
It’s the same thing they use on education. Better to not improve any one’s situation if you can’t do something for “all”.
Which, as we know, is bullshit for just doing nothing to help anybody, anywhere.
Corner Stone
Also too, part of the argument against mass transit was because it supposedly benefited The Blacks (aka The Poors) more than other groups.
But with George Will himself riding the train, shouldn’t this elevate the argument for rail?
Stefan
No pair of cities less than 400 miles apart should lack for high speed rail. That we can’t get there is, I guess, an instance of American exceptionalism.
It’s funny (by which I mean, tragic) that whenever a liberal proposes that the US engage in an ambitious, visionary, technologically-advanced, forward-thinking project, be it HSR, reforming healthcare, or investing in alternative energy, the conservative response is to say, essentially, no we can’t: America is too poor, too stupid, too incompetent to do it, and we should be content to wallow in our own filth rather than get ahead of ourselves.
I read a historian once who theorized that one reason why the Midwest developed well ahead of the South was that the former region was settled by hard-working German and Scandinavian farmers who, when they came to a river, said “let’s build a bridge, it will cost time and effort but it will pay off in the end”, while the South was colonized by Scots-Irish peasants who, when they came to a river tried to find a ford, and once they found it said “fuck it, good enough, why waste time with a bridge?”. I see this divide continues today….
Corner Stone
@DFH no.6:
Damn, but seafood enchiladas from Gringo’s sound really frickin good about now.
drkrick
I don’t understand this. Kids get kicked off HS teams for backtalking the coach or being lazy in practice all the time, and the coach has complete control of who gets benched and who plays? Hard to believe a coach would have a harder time defending discipline against a player accused of sexual assault than stuff like that unless the coach and the school consider it less serious. Perhaps they thought her unwillingness to service the athletes was also a refusal do perform her duties as a cheerleader.
Corner Stone
@Stefan:
I’m pretty sure this analogy isn’t going to get very far.
qwerty42
@Chris: …I’m not sure how they think that helps their case. …
It doesn’t help their case. It’s just silly and stupid. But they want to believe it.
Gravie
My daughter lives in Missoula, Montana and frequently takes Amtrak. Going to Portland, OR next weekend by train, as a matter of fact. She leaves out of Glacier National Park, which is another great reason to get on board. As several people pointed out, the scenery from a train window can’t be beat, especially in that part of the country.
RalfW
I recall reading that Fargo, North Dakota has a ton of demand for Amtrak, despite the awful arrival/departure times. I read it in a post about extending the (Walker-killed) high speed line from Chicago to Minneapolis with continuing (regular speed?) service to Fargo.
At the crappy, middle of the night boarding times (2:15 am towards Minneapolis/Chicago, 3:30 am heading west), Fargo managed 21,514 boardings and alightings in FY ’09 (source: Amtrak).
Figure 81 people per day. From that, figure about 20 on and 20 off each of the east and west-bound trains. At friggin’ 2:30 and 3:30 in the morning. When half the year its 30 below zero and windswept at 3 am.
Yeah, Amtrak must really suck if only 80 people are on a major caffeine jag and boarding or departing a train in Fargo each damn night.
Heh, friggin indeed!
Amanda in the South Bay
@Tom:
LA-Bakersfield will/should be covered by HSR from LA to SF (we passed Prop…whatever it was in 2008 that covered that).
At this rate, though, the NIMBYs may just win.
danimal
Conservative opposition to trains is one of those coalition-building things that conservatives pay lip service to but don’t really care about (except that it pisses off liberals). At some point, a conservative will champion train ridership and all the conservative anti-Amtrak claptrap will float off into the ether. The memory hole will be filled with conservative train-policy pontifications.
The new party line will be that conservatives have always loved trains. John Henry was a good Republica, doncha know? And anyone who challenges the new party line is being mean because shut up, that’s why.
drkrick
I think the problem was less with the “peasants” and more with the younger sons of cavaliers in the big houses who didn’t want to pay taxes for anything that would benefit the peasants, too.
Church Lady
@Stillwater:
At the time of the refusal to cheer incident in question, he hadn’t even been indicted, much less convicted of anything. He had only been accused. The school couldn’t keep him off the basketball team at that point. Once he was indicted, about a year or so later, I believe he was kicked out of school.
Stefan
I think the problem was less with the “peasants” and more with the younger sons of cavaliers in the big houses who didn’t want to pay taxes for anything that would benefit the peasants, too.
Also, too, yes. That and the fact that they had slaves so never felt the need to invest in public good and services because the slaves would just do all the hard unpleasant work.
Stefan
At the time of the refusal to cheer incident in question, he hadn’t even been indicted, much less convicted of anything. He had only been accused. The school couldn’t keep him off the basketball team at that point. Once he was indicted, about a year or so later, I believe he was kicked out of school.
What, the school can kick someone off the basketball team for. say, talking back to the coach or blowing off practice, but it can’t kick him off after another student accuses him of rape? Especially given the supposed “zero-tolerance towards violence” policies that schools have instituted over the last decades?
I was not aware of a “cannot be kicked off unless indicted” rule for high school athletics, especially since the same school kicked his accuser off the cheerleading squad for the gross crime of standing silently with her arms folded.
Roger Moore
@drkrick:
To many coaches, the seriousness of an offense is inversely related to the talent of the player who committed it. So talking back to the coach is a serious offense for a scrub, but murder is barely enough to justify benching a star. It takes a very bold coach to put principle, even a matter of common decency like not letting a rapist play, above winning. My guess is that the rapist in this case must be a good player, or the school wouldn’t have bothered backing him to the hilt.
MattR
@drkrick: @Stefan: @Roger Moore: I wonder how much/if the multi million dollar settlements Duke paid out has had any change in how schools react to accusations.
DFH no.6
@Corner Stone:
Haven’t been to Gringos since the old one by ASU closed a couple years back and moved somewhere else.
I like to scratch my Mexican seafood itch in the desert here at San Carlos Bay on McDowell by SR-51. In the barrio, and authentic, far as I can tell, anyway.
And conveniently just down the street from my wife’s workplace at Good Sam Hospital.
Haven’t been in a while; now that you got me thinking about it I believe I’ll head over there this week one day after my wife gets done sticking needles in people, or whatever it is RNs do all day.
Stefan
I wonder how much/if the multi million dollar settlements Duke paid out has had any change in how schools react to accusations.
I’d say…no effect. High schools and colleges are very different things; high schools are given a far greater degree of latitude by courts when it comes to threats or acts of violence committed by their students.
Pangloss
FY 2010 FAA Budget: $9.5 billion ($5.3 billion after revenues)
FY 2010 Amtrak Budget: $2.96 billion ($1.55 billion after revenues)
Elliecat
Has anyone mentioned that there actually was a terrorist attack on Amtrak a few years ago? Of course, it was “just” white right-wing militia types in Arizona who blew up a bridge or something out in the desert. Luckily it was discovered before a train actually got that far.
Maybe we should have a “Not allowed to go near railroad bridges” list.
TG Chicago
@Stillwater: Agreed that the “school had no choice” bit from Joyner was ridiculous. How hard would it be to just let the girl sit out some cheers? Pretty simple solution.
Also, the comments made it clear that Joyner and Mataconis are clearly more interested in protecting men from false accusations of rape (a real problem, but a rare one) than protecting rape victims from further victimization based on being outed (a far more common problem). Truly a grotesque mindset.
But then, expecting empathy from a libertarian is probably unwise.
john f
@koalaholik:I agree, I-25 south from Denver along the Rockies is a beautiful drive.
MTiffany
@Juicetard (FKA Liberty60):
For the portion of I-95 that runs through Delaware, it turned quite a large profit. For the state of Delaware. The federal government (and all non-Delaware US Taxpayers) still took a loss on it.
Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water
Isn’t the whole idea of Amtrak or any public transit is that they are a social good – that subsidizing their operations accomplishes other goals (getting people out of their cars, hence reducing commuting times and reducing pollution, for example) and looking at their profit and loss statements misses the entire point?
john f
@danimal: William S Lind put forth an article within the last year but I don’t know how much it’s gotten among conservatives. Not much from what I can see. Conservatives will only support rail only when there is a Repub back in the WH. Then they’ll say they were always for it.
Conservatives should like rail by William S Lind
http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/107079873.html
jwest
First off, Doug Mataconis at OTB is a raving liberal.
To answer the question of where a conservative blog is where facts rule – Just One Minute.
http://justoneminute.typepad.com/
Not only is the author, Tom Maguire, quoted regularly, the commentators are the most skilled, well-connected and knowledgeable group on the internet.
Gregory
@jwest: Pull the other one.
sneezy
@geg6:
Yup. My understanding is that he is a member of the League of the South, and so I assume that anytime he sounds reasonable, he’s lying. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I can spit.
Church Lady
@Stefan:
You’re not comparing apples to apples. He was accused of a crime by and against a fellow student. He was arrested and was kicked off the football team and (I think) expelled from the school at that time. A few months later a Grand Jury was convened and refused to indict for rape. At that point, he was readmitted to the school and allowed to be on the basketball team. It was at this point that the cheerleader made her protest. She was given two choices – cheer as directed or get kicked off the squad. She made her choice and was no longer a cheerleader. Shortly after this, she and her parents filed suit.
Please keep in mind that at this point, the basketball player was still innocent, UNDER THE LAW. We do have that pesky “innocent until proven guilty” thing going in this country.
Later, he was indicted by a (presumably) different Grand Jury for sexual assault and was once again expelled from the school. He eventually plead down to a simple assault charge.
There is a lot that I don’t agree with on a moral basis. Would I have allowed her to refuse to cheer for this piece of dirt? Yes. Would I have kicked her off the cheerleading squad for refusing to cheer for him? No. Do I think it’s kind of shitty that her family has been ordered to pay the school district’s legal fees? Yes.
On a legal basis, however, it appears the Courts decided the case correctly, under the law, including the assessment of the legal fees. This wasn’t the result from some podunk Texas state court, but two Federal appellate courts instead finding repeatedly for the school district.
What type of justice serves our moral outrage is not always available under the constraints of the law. About the only thing most can take comfort in is that, even though he wasn’t convicted for it, the basketball player in question will always be known as the guy that raped a girl. Small consolation that it is.
Stefan
Please keep in mind that at this point, the basketball player was still innocent, UNDER THE LAW. We do have that pesky “innocent until proven guilty” thing going in this country.
Innocent until proven guilty applies to the state’s ability to imprison, fine, etc. someone of accused of a crime. It does not apply to a school’s ability to allow someone to partake in an extracurricular activity. Just because he has not yet been convicted by the court system doesn’t mean the school has to allow him full privileges.
An example: a student calls in a bomb threat to the school. He’s arrested, but not yet indicted or convicted. Can the school still suspend and/or expel him, even though the law still regards him as innocent? Hell, yes.
Arclite
@EconWatcher:
I think it’s the same people who believe in Creationism over evolution, but don’t hesitate to take antibiotics, or fly in an airplane, or accept that the world is round.
Electricgrendel
Please change your handle to “humorless poster.” All I can think of is one of those inspirational cat posters, but the cat is all frowny and crying.
Juicetard (FKA Liberty60)
@Roger Moore:
Or maybe lets cut off all federal funds for roads in those red states- if the Market [pause to genuflect] wanted there to be roads, It would have provided them.
Joeshabadoo
@Juicetard (FKA Liberty60):
I came to write something like this. Cars are subsidized to the extreme.
It’s not just that. If you read something about public transportation in another country they always put in a footnote of “government susidized” even if it has no real reason to be there.
You never see that mentioned about roads because people don’t think about it. Roads are just there.