* Trump voters there have mostly never stepped foot on any sort of public transit their whole life. They do not want high speed rails, they want the interstates to be upgraded and widened.
One big rig passing another on a 2 lane section of I 94 really is a drag, suddenly everyone has to drop to 60mph or worse.
* Calling BS. Some Trump, GOP voters already ride Amtrak & public transit, and they would do so more if 3 things changed: 1) Sense of pride & professionalism in how the service is run. 2) Sense of urgency & accountability in getting the damn thing to run on time, w/ reasonable goals for improvement. 3) An end to the whining & excuses from Congress, Neocon bozos about how rail is not an inherently American thing. Before 1950 it was the norm, and it was a great way to keep in touch with fellow citizens, and way more civilized than your average airline experience nowadays.
* Riding the rail cross country is a pretty cool way to see the sights. Though the affirmative action hires, conductors and servers, leave much to be desired.
* What really makes sense (but is very expensive) is to put in high speed rail so that a city that is 100 miles from Chicago can be a commuter suburb that can be reached in 45 minutes. Milwaukee and South Bend would both fit in this radius. This is what the Chinese are doing.
* The problem is there as well as here, who would actually use it? Unless heavily subsidized, ticket prices would not be able to compete with air travel. As an exercise, pick two cities (say LA – SF) and book both a flight and an Amtrak journey, and guess what? Flying will likely be the cheaper option or close to the same price.
And like with FL, tourists wouldn’t use it either, would someone going to Disney World(land) take a train to another city? Why? Not to mention the fact that once they’ve arrived (flight or rail) they’re going to need to rent a car. Even though it’s the slower option, someone that really wants to go Orlando to Tampa (LA to SF) will simply brave I-4(5) and have a car when they get there.
* I like that old-school New Deal big government, I admit. Kept blue collar people working and created jobs for people with 90 IQs so they didn’t become meth heads (drunks in that era). Won WW2 (I realize many here regard this as a bad thing) and helped us survive the Great Depression. Brought the country together instead of subdividing us over identity politics. (I admit I am ‘alt-lite’ and make no apology for it.) And left an architectural legacy we can still see. It’s when liberalism turned into lifestyle liberalism instead of delivering real benefits to working people that it went wrong, IMHO. Bannon’s kind of in that tradition, which I like.
