As I have said before, spending ANY federal rail dollars in Florida is a COMPLETE WASTE.
Florida High-Speed Rail Faces Uncertain Destination.
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Filed under: Passenger Rail Politics, United States High Speed Rail
While it may not be the most sensible place to have HSR, America clearly needs a proof of concept. I’d say most of us diehard HSR advocates have been on the trains somewhere else in the world and thought, “Why do they have it and we don’t?”. More Americans need that experience, before we can summon the political will to get going on the really effective but more expensive and long-term efforts.
Spending federal money on HSR in Florida is a waste, but spending money to improve service
in Florida of conventional rail makes a lot of sense. We need to go forward with new service
on the FEC and we need to restore the Sunset Limited, or a connection between Neworleans and
Florida, and we need to restore the Palmetto at least to Jacksonville. Then we need to make all
trains daily or more. I believe that this can be done for considerably less than HSR, but it will
frequire some “free federal money” as URPA likes to put it. We need to quit spending so much on
the NEC and improve service elsewhere. I tout Florida, but there are many other areas that suffer
from good rail service, while the NEC gets much more than a lions share. The NEC blackhole needs
to be cut loose from Amtrak and survive on it’s own.
Can you explain why you’re so adamant that expanding the passenger rail infrastructure of the fourth most-populous state in the Union is “a waste”? You do realize that tens of millions of tourists visit Florida every year, right? And that no matter what patronizing language you might use about “Mickey and Minnie”, that this is one of their essential, core basic industries?
See my response on the post regarding “canceling HSR is economic treason. Thanks,
Pat