youtube anti-high speed rail video

spidey3 wrote:Really? They are going to be willing to trade a limited, known, cost of compliance with regulations, vs. potentially unlimited liability to compensatory and punitive damages when passengers or employees die in accidents? If this is so, then we ought to be regulating for safety on purely moral grounds...

They don't have a choice ... the fines for not complying with the regulations will force the railroads to comply with upgrades that will cost them more than the cost of the events that they prevent. The railroads are not unsafe the way they are today. At some point it becomes a jobs program for regulators ... pencil pushers dolling out fines to railroads because they didn't cross the T in safety.

As far as moral grounds ... as long as a train is moving it has the potential to kill or maim. So how about we write a law where trains cannot be moved. Period. Then we won't have any collisions between trains and other trains or other objects. It is our moral obligation to prevent every train injury and death. The only way to prevent every train injury and death is to stop running trains. Shut them off, weld the wheels to the rails and don't ever run one again. And hope that the alternative to rail transportation has a better injury/fatality rate. Otherwise ending train service would be an immoral thing to do.

There has to be a middle ground. Infinite regulation just leads to parked trains. Super safe ... but not getting the job done.

justalurker66 wrote:They don't have a choice ... the fines for not complying with the regulations will force the railroads to comply with upgrades that will cost them more than the cost of the events that they prevent. The railroads are not unsafe the way they are today. At some point it becomes a jobs program for regulators ... pencil pushers dolling out fines to railroads because they didn't cross the T in safety.
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As far as moral grounds ... as long as a train is moving it has the potential to kill or maim. So how about we write a law where trains cannot be moved. Period.
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There has to be a middle ground. Infinite regulation just leads to parked trains. Super safe ... but not getting the job done.

I think you misunderstand me. It is exactly my point that compliance with regulation is cheaper than being fined for negligence in the absence of regulation. I am arguing that reasonable safety regulation is worthwhile -- and in the long run advantageous for business because it eliminates the uncertainty about how to define "safe".

Amtrakowitz wrote:

What market distortion?
Government support of infrastructure. Thought I already said that. Let the free market dictate how infrastructure is built, not the government, and let the free market be paid per use.

If a truly free, completely open-market, anarchy-except-for-a-constable economy were possible, we would be in complete agreement.

But we are living in a mixed economy, and while the failures of socialism are clearly "coming home to roost" the vast majority of the electorate doesen't have the self-confidence to dismantle that morass completely.

And like the airlines and navigable inland wateerways (barges), the railroad, by its basic nature, makes some degree of public-sector participation a necessity.

The freight railroads know this; they made the notorious "Faustian pact" that created Amtrak forty years ago. Noiw they're stuck with a service which was modeled on a money-losing public-relations gesture, has absolutely no hope of ever turning a fully-costed profit, but has a loyal core clientele of sentimentalists and a generous supply of political lackeys to sustain it (as long as the cost doesn't get too high).

And they rebuilt their own privately-held infrastcuture with no help other than the stop-gap operation of Conrail, and then returned those resources to the private sector where thry belong. The clearing-away of a huge burden of unnecessary economic regulation was what made this possible.

So they're going to submit to any HSR plans only if forced to, and will be ready to say "I told you so" when the inflated bill comes due.

Within the next few months, we are likely to enter a new stage of the Great Recession, which likely began some time back in 2005-2006. The Congress will probably revert to gridlock, while the electorate seems likely to remain highly polarized over the choice of economic remedies. The HSR concept, rightly or wrongly, has become strongly identifed with only one extreme of that divide.

And that is likely to preclude any serious development of reasonable upgrades of our present passenger rail system in the growing number of regions for which iappears to be a reasonable otion (and is likely to become more suitalble, given the certainty of increasing scarcity of fossil fuel).

The stridency of the HSR advocacvy (which appears to be mostly concentrated among young and recent newcomwers to these forums) needs to be modifed into the sort of pragmatism which thoseof us with longer and greated exposure to real-world operating limitations are familiar. Otherwise, we're likely to end up very close to Square One again.