Here’s what makes automobiles the devil incarnate – IOTW Report

Here’s what makes automobiles the devil incarnate

Friday, 27 August 2021, 11:45 MJA Uncategorized 24

American Thinker:
By Mark C. Ross

It’s not their exhaust or the fuel they burn; it’s their steering wheels.  Drivers get to go wherever they want to go, even if it’s not to a “good” place.  Trains run on rails and don’t need steering wheels.  They go where the all-wise planners know you ought to be.

Thus is explained the irrational preference for passenger rail transport that is continually expressed by the American left.  Amtrak is a dud.  It’s trapped in the past — before automobiles opened up the vast American continent.  Rail is great for shipping freight, but not people, who need to be fed, take naps, and go to the bathroom.  Lumber, sugar beets, soybeans, and automobiles are much easier to handle.  Amtrak, however, has the right-of-way on the tracks, forcing freight trains to pull into “holes” to get out of the way, thus delaying the completion of their tasks and increasing the cost.

Meanwhile, the reductio ad absurdum of the passenger rail pipe dream is California’s HSR (high-speed rail).  After years of work and billions of dollars spent, some day in the future, folks wanting to get from Bakersfield to Modesto in a hurry will probably still have to drive.  Even some incompetent and corrupt politicians are starting to get cold feet:

Years ago, the Legislature empaneled a group of “experts” to forecast the bottom-line reality of the project.  Their finding, back then, was that the operating cost of sending a passenger from the Bay Area to metro Los Angeles via HSR was greater than the retail price of an airline ticket.  Since then, HSR has accumulated still more cost overruns. read more

24 Comments on Here’s what makes automobiles the devil incarnate

  4. Amtrack stops in my town every other day or so. Every time they stop, they dump a couple of mentally ill people here. No warning, just a nutjob wandering the streets.

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  6. “Amtrak, however, has the right-of-way on the tracks, forcing freight trains to pull into “holes” to get out of the way, thus delaying the completion of their tasks and increasing the cost.”

    Not true. The last time we rode on Amtrak… Harrisburg, PA to El Paso, TX we spent more time sitting on sidings than riding the rails so the freight trains could pass by unheeded.

    Riding cross country on a train was a dream of mine since I was a child, until I did. We cancelled our return tickets and chose to rent a car for the journey home. Much more enjoyable trip BTW.

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  10. The potential rider pool for HSR is a little sliver:
    – Must be traveling
    – Must want to travel between two specific locations
    – Can afford the ticket
    – Doesn’t prefer flying

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  11. …I would encourage you to read this entire 40 year old article, then compare what is described to the world as it is now..

    https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15142347/ferrari-reinvents-manifest-destiny-pj-orourke-and-a-ferrari-308gts-archived-feature/

    “It may sound strange to say that a $45,000 Italian sports car reaffirmed my belief in America, but, as I said, it’s all part of Western Civilization and here we were in America, the apogee of that fine trend in human affairs. And, after all, what have we been getting civilized for, all these centuries? Why did we fight all those wars, conquer all those nations, kidnap all those Africans, and kill all the Indians in the Western Hemisphere? Why, for this! For this perfection of knowledge and craft. For this conquest of the physical elements. For this sense of mastery of man over nature. To be in control of our destinies—and there is no more profound feeling of control over one’s destiny that I have ever experienced than to drive a Ferrari down a public road at 130 miles an hour. Only God can make a tree, but only man can drive by one that fast. And if the lowly Italians, the lamest, silliest, least stable of our NATO allies, can build a machine like this, just think what it is that we can do. We can smash the atom. We can cure polio. We can fly to the moon if we like. There is nothing we can’t do. Maybe we don’t happen to build Ferraris, but that’s not because there’s anything wrong with America. We just haven’t turned the full light of our intelligence and ability in that direction. We were, you know, busy elsewhere. We may not have Ferraris, but just think what our Polaris-missile submarines are like. And, if it feels like this in a Ferrari at 130, my God, what can it possibly feel like at Mach 2.5 in an F-15? Ferrari 308s and F-15s—these are the conveyances of free men. What do the Bolshevik automatons know of destiny and its control? What have we to fear from the barbarous Red hordes?”

    -P.J.O,’Rourke, “Ferrari Reinvents Manifest Destiny: P.J. O’Rourke and a Ferrari 308GTS”

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  14. @ǝpɐɥsʇɥɓᴉuɹǝdnS — Thanks! That O’Rourke article was from back when I was a happy subscriber to C&D, back when P.J. was a great and SANE writer.

    I’t been obvious, at least to me, that the freedom and autonomy represented by personal cars & trucks was what the collectivist central planners hated and were dead set against all along.

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  15. Uncle Al ʘ
    AUGUST 27, 2021 AT 12:59 PM
    “@ǝpɐɥsʇɥɓᴉuɹǝdnS — Thanks! That O’Rourke article was from back when I was a happy subscriber to C&D, back when P.J. was a great and SANE writer.”

    …yeah, he lost it when he went pro-Hillary – probably the drugs he always admitted to – but to that point, mostly he made sense.

    I used to read him in Rolling Stone and, later, National Review (back when THAT wasn’t Deep State), and he usually summarized things well. I still quote him like above, but generally such quotes are a minimum of 20 years old, nothing worth quoting since, guess Time really DOES make fools of us all, PJ definitely NOT excepted…

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  17. If you want to see the absolute worst part of a city enter it by train. The rail lines are magnets for lazy people to dump their trash and for homeless to build tent cities at the overpasses. Dilapidated buildings, roads, bridges. Abandoned row-homes block after block after block….

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  19. when I was a kid, we used to put pennies on the railroad tracks for something to do. Well, one night, someone put a manhole cover on the tracks. Laid the ‘Chicago Unlimited’ right over on its side in the middle of the night. I think he might still be in jail.

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  20. Jethro
    AUGUST 27, 2021 AT 1:12 PM
    “If you want to see the absolute worst part of a city enter it by train.”
    …they use busses to destroy neighborhoods, too. The 100 year old second ring suburb I had to leave was ruined when the big city dwellers decided they wanted the projects replaced with high dollar condos and gave the generational poverty, want, hate, drug users, drug dealers, and girlfriend farm dwellers bus passes and Section 8 vouchers to come ruin MY neighborhood instead. The place turned into a shooting gallery, both kinds, and I got tired of calling the insurance guy every time they shot out all the car windows on my street and losing the use of various sides of my house because of the police tape from the murder investigation, so I left.

    They have more shootings and home invasions now, so it was the right choice.

    So you don’t need a train to wreck a neighborhood.

    ANY public transit will do.

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  21. Of all the lines on Amtrak the only one in the country that makes a profit is the Downeaster. It runs between Maine & Boston.
    People take it to go to Bruins games and the like. The Boston station is in the Garden.
    The others are in the red.
    They should not be subsidized any more.
    If they want to stay in business they need to do what other companies do. Make it appealing with features consumers want.

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  22. …it’s true that you can’t steer a train, and that’s what makes them so deadly…they can’t swerve. I once took a guy’s daughter to the hospital one night when I was driving with him in the front seat, and she was stable and it was a further out hospital so I had some time to talk to him, and he turned out to be a train engineer. He told me that there’s two kinds of engineers: the ones that killed someone, and the ones that are going to. It’s just the nature of what happens when people run, bike, and drive in front of vehicles that can’t steer away or stop suddenly. Higher speed trains would make this problem much, MUCH worse, not to mention the liklihood of derailing on indifferently maintained, earthquake damaged, or Democrat sabotaged rails is made exponentially more likely by the higher speeds and even MORE reduced reaction time.

    Also, trains just get in the way because they take up real estate and, again, can’t swerve. Cincinnati bought an EXTREMELY stupid streetcar because “rails are better”, and setting aside the fact that no one rides it because it doesn’t go anywhere anyone wants to be EVEN THOUGH IT’S FREE, this thing spends LOTS of time stuck in traffic because of emergency vehicles, delivery vehicles, broken down vehicles, and just plain people who park stupid…because it CAN’T GO AROUND ANYTHING.

    So what’s a virtue to controlling Democrats is a HUGE downside to everyone ELSE.

    You CAN NOT STEER THEM.

    And that makes them pretty much worthless…

  23. They built a “light rail” system in Baltimore – an above ground version of a subway. They ran routes to the north and north west with stops at large shopping malls in nice suburban towns. The thugs began using it to ride out to the malls from the ghettos to steal cars to drive back into the ghettos. It got the nickname “fright rail”.

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