Tennessee wants aboard high-speed rail= "Growth in auto traf­fic in China..."

"Growth in auto traf­fic in China and India and the result­ing increase in oil and gaso­line costs pro­vide a bell­wether show­ing how expanded rail ser­vice will be needed in the U.S. in the future, Car­pen­ter said."

More Cars or High Speed Rail?=Nine Day Traffic Jam in China
http://www.harrydavis2010.com/node/410

The Tenessean
Aug. 20, 2010, Editorial

http://blogs.tennessean.com/opinion/2010/08/19/tennessee-wants-aboard-hi...

When the idea of an Atlanta-Chattanooga-Nashville high-speed train route was talked about pub­licly two years ago, pro­po­nents con­tended it should be given seri­ous consideration.

A $1 mil­lion fea­si­bil­ity study that had recently been con­ducted on the Nashville-to-Chattanooga leg showed the project to be doable, but that it would cost an esti­mated $5.4 bil­lion in pub­lic and pri­vate dollars.

Now comes word that Ten­nessee and Georgia’s depart­ments of trans­porta­tion have jointly applied for $34 mil­lion in fed­eral stim­u­lus fund­ing to develop high-speed rail ser­vice from Atlanta to Chat­tanooga, Nashville and even­tu­ally Louisville, Ky. The Fed­eral Rail­road Admin­is­tra­tion grants would allow the two states to con­tinue envi­ron­men­tal plan­ning and engi­neer­ing for a high-speed link between Atlanta and Chat­tanooga, Geor­gia Trans­porta­tion Com­mis­sioner Vance C. Smith Jr. announced recently.

While crit­ics prob­a­bly will say this is a waste of time and tax­payer money, offi­cials work­ing on the project should con­tinue mov­ing for­ward with an idea that still is in its early plan­ning and eval­u­a­tion stages.

“We need to have more of a regional approach to con­nect­ing our trans­porta­tion options, because the cur­rent sys­tem is not going to be able to sat­isfy future needs,’’ Joe Car­pen­ter, assis­tant com­mis­sioner in charge of the Ten­nessee Depart­ment of Transportation’s envi­ron­ment and plan­ning divi­sion, says. “Look­ing down the line, we need to posi­tion our­selves to have viable cor­ri­dors that can sup­port more movement.’’

In other states, that is cur­rently being done. Accord­ing to the Fed­eral Rail­road Admin­is­tra­tion, Vir­ginia recently began a new ser­vice to Wash­ing­ton from Char­lottesville and Lynch­burg that is show­ing 163 per­cent more rid­ers than pro­jected. An addi­tional train is being added from Wash­ing­ton to Richmond.

Rid­er­ship is also reported to be up 25 per­cent between St. Louis and Kansas City, 7 per­cent between New York and Chicago and 12 per­cent between St. Louis and Chicago. The Fed­eral Rail­road Admin­is­tra­tion also said North Carolina’s rail sys­tem, which will become a high-speed cor­ri­dor in the near future, has reported 200 per­cent growth. In the West, the Amtrak Cas­cades route is show­ing record rid­er­ship between Seat­tle and Port­land, and Amtrak’s North­east Cor­ri­dor ser­vice has over­taken air­lines for travel between New York and Washington.

Growth in auto traf­fic in China and India and the result­ing increase in oil and gaso­line costs pro­vide a bell­wether show­ing how expanded rail ser­vice will be needed in the U.S. in the future, Car­pen­ter said.

“Our respon­si­bil­ity is to help edu­cate the pub­lic on what the impli­ca­tions will be if we had a high-speed rail ser­vice from Atlanta to Chat­tanooga and on to Nashville. We can’t sit back and do nothing.’’

If we do noth­ing, Ten­nessee stands a good chance of being left behind as other states move for­ward in their dif­fer­ent modes of trans­porta­tion. And, as oth­ers have said, if we do noth­ing toward inte­grat­ing our modes of trans­porta­tion, we will only see our high­ways and air­ports become more con­gested than they are now.

Cer­tainly, the idea of trav­el­ing to Atlanta from Nashville in only 52 min­utes by rail sounds great. But as Car­pen­ter said, it is going to take much more eval­u­at­ing and plan­ning to be sure that the idea is fea­si­ble and not a waste of tax­payer dol­lars. But if Ten­nessee sits out the process entirely, it risks being unable to get aboard in com­ing years, when the need for mass tran­sit will be greatly increased.

49 Responses to “Tennessee wants aboard high-speed rail”
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My2CentsWorth
August 20, 2010 at 4:27 am
Colos­sal waste of money, so it will prob­a­bly happen.

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Donald Red Bear Watkins
August 20, 2010 at 4:30 am
Mass Tran­sit of this type is com­mon place in a great many cities. I know if pas­sen­ger trains were avail­able from my area into cities such as Clarksville, Nashville, etc I’d use them and I know many oth­ers that would as well.

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My2CentsWorth
August 20, 2010 at 4:56 am
The cost can­not be jus­ti­fied. Pas­sen­ger trains lose money.

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Donald Red Bear Watkins
August 20, 2010 at 5:02 am
No you refuse to adjust your pre­cious sched­ule to meet the tran­sit sched­ule. Peo­ple plan their sched­ules around mass tran­sit sched­ule all over the world. If oth­ers can do it so can we.

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SurrealMcCoy
August 20, 2010 at 5:11 am
Pub­lic trans­porta­tion is not a viable option for every­one, Donald.

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Donald Red Bear Watkins
August 20, 2010 at 5:12 am
Too bad, I’m for this mass pub­lic tran­sit, period!

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AlanB
August 21, 2010 at 10:02 pm
By the that logic My2CentsWorth, roads can­not be jus­ti­fied either then. After all, roads lose money too!

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Donald Red Bear Watkins
August 20, 2010 at 5:15 am
Some peo­ple would refuse to ride this type of mass tran­sit because they’d be rid­ing with other races of peo­ple. This is the men­tal­ity of a great many in the South­east­ern United States aka “The Old South”.

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Dragon2
August 20, 2010 at 7:11 am
Unbe­liev­able. If you don’t sup­port the train, you are a racist? Lib­er­al­ism IS a men­tal disease.

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bj1959
August 20, 2010 at 7:21 am
Of course dragon, when you dis­agree with a dem you are a nazi, racist, big­oted, sex­ist, homo­phobe. And above all you are intol­er­ant of the opin­ion of others.

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Donald Red Bear Watkins
August 20, 2010 at 7:27 am
You said it, I didn’t.

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bj1959
August 20, 2010 at 7:37 am
Thank you Don­ald, I can always count on you to put the excla­ma­tion point to what I was say­ing. Keep up the good work!

Donald Red Bear Watkins
August 20, 2010 at 7:26 am
It isn’t lib­er­al­ism D2. It is bru­tal honesty.

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My2CentsWorth
August 20, 2010 at 5:41 am
The cost of pas­sen­ger rail ser­vice is sim­ply not viable. Amtrak could not sur­vive with­out fed­eral sub­si­dies, which means every tax­payer is pay­ing a por­tion of every ticket. I rode the City of New Orleans from Mem­phis to Chicago sev­eral years ago and it was an extra­or­di­nar­ily mis­er­able expe­ri­ence. The Music City Star loses money every day and will con­tinue to lose money as long as it is in oper­a­tion. There are much more effi­cient uses of tax dol­lars than flush­ing them down the rail­road rat hole.

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daKine7
August 20, 2010 at 5:48 am
“Mas­ter lib­eral plan” to do away with the mid­dle class.….do peo­ple this para­noid and delu­sional actu­ally exist?

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quasmodic
August 20, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Yeah, they exist right beside Red Bear Watkins, who actu­ally said if you don’t want a high speed rail line, then you are a racist. Unbelievable.

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Zen Bubba
August 20, 2010 at 5:52 am
Yes they do. The Pro­ton­azi (for­merly repub­li­can party) is divorced from real­ity and their con­cept of intel­lect is watch­ing Glenn Beck (who has never given any proof that he didn’t kill that girl) and Rush Lim­baugh (who has never given any proof that he wasn’t import­ing drugs)

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quasmodic
August 20, 2010 at 9:02 pm
If they did some­thing ille­gal, it’s the government’s job to prove they did, not the other way around. Can you prove you didn’t smoke crack last week like every­one said you did? Prove it! See how silly that is?

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My2CentsWorth
August 20, 2010 at 6:03 am
Lib­er­als are the most greedy, self­ish peo­ple on the planet. Always will­ing to accept hand­outs from the gov­ern­ment with no thought of where the money comes from to pay for them. But please, give us our trains (or what­ever other ser­vice we desire) and the rich will pay for it because we won’t.

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Donald Red Bear Watkins
August 20, 2010 at 6:04 am
Sim­ply hogwash!

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whaleback
August 20, 2010 at 6:15 am
Don­ald the thing about you is that you are always will­ing to take from your providers (the rich) and then you turn around an belit­tle them every chance you get and it is grow­ing old.
A thank you now and then would be nice, but thats not the lib­eral way its tax, tax, tax the rich and com­plain its never enough.

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AlanB
August 21, 2010 at 10:10 pm
Well if you drove a car onto a high­way last year, then you are obvi­ously a lib­eral, since you accepted a hand­out from the gov­ern­ment with no thought of where the money comes from to pay for them.

Last year the Fed spent $69.616 Bil­lion on our high­ways. Of that amount, the “users” only paid $34.116 Bil­lion via the Fed­eral fuel taxes. That means that a $34.5 sub­sidy came out of the Gen­eral fund. Put another way, every man, women, and child in this coun­try paid about $112 so that you could con­tinue to drive on a high­way, with­out regard to whether or not they actu­ally own a car, much less can drive one.

And again, that’s just Fed­eral sub­si­dies. Most cities, coun­ties, and states fur­ther sub­si­dize the roads.

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nash1945
August 20, 2010 at 6:05 am
Zen.…I think you are con­fus­ing Glen with Ted Kennedy

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Steve Bolin
August 20, 2010 at 6:09 am
Actu­ally Zen, the liberal-progressive-socialist party is closer to the Nazi party of 1930s Ger­many. The removal of indi­vid­ual free­doms and per­se­cu­tion of unpop­u­lar peo­ple was the pri­mary tool of the Nazi party.

DaKline7 — please let me remind you of the quote from Rahm Emanuel “let no cri­sis go to waste” and what was not said “never fail to foment a cri­sis when you can”.

Red Bear — “delu­sional and self-serving”? Please! Com­ing from a grown man who is still play­ing cow­boys and indi­ans? Thanks for the early morn­ing chuckle.

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Donald Red Bear Watkins
August 20, 2010 at 6:12 am
I’m not play­ing any­thing Wasi’chu.

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Zen Bubba
August 20, 2010 at 6:12 am
Yes, because the Ger­man Nazi’s also wanted equal rights for gays and minorities.

Sure.

It’s hard to beleive that any­one is as loopy as a pro­ton­azi (for­merly republican)

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jmjenkins
August 20, 2010 at 7:00 am
Steve, I’ve made the point twice already that “Nazi” was just the short form for the “National Social­ist Party”, but Zen has decided to go with his lit­tle invented moniker, regard­less of how stu­pid it makes him appear. And for a Native Amer­i­can who abhors the very idea of assim­i­la­tion, the Chief sure does embrace a lot of the white man’s ways. Word has it he even dri­ves a truck and uses com­put­ers and the Inter­net. Imag­ine that!

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Zen Bubba
August 20, 2010 at 6:19 am
“The removal of indi­vid­ual free­doms and per­se­cu­tion of unpop­u­lar peo­ple was the pri­mary tool of the Nazi party.”

KInda like the repub­li­cans are doing to gays and minorities?

Yeah. That’s what I thought.

Pro­ton­azis.

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UnionBaby
August 20, 2010 at 6:38 am
Don­ald Red Bear Watkins — great idea, how can I help this move­ment along?

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Donald Red Bear Watkins
August 20, 2010 at 6:42 am
Good ques­tion UB! Let me get with my war­rior coun­cil and we’ll fig­ure out the plan to accom­plish the goal. LOL

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My2CentsWorth
August 20, 2010 at 6:46 am
The con­ver­sa­tion has got­ten off track (pun intended). There is sim­ply no eco­nomic fea­si­bil­ity to build­ing high speed pas­sen­ger trains in most of this coun­try with­out exten­sive fed­eral sub­si­dies. How much has the Music City Star lost since it’s been in operation?

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Donald Red Bear Watkins
August 20, 2010 at 6:47 am
Your ban­ter is hit­ting deaf ears! I will shout “I’m for mass pub­lic tran­sit” from the roof tops if necessary!

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My2CentsWorth
August 20, 2010 at 6:53 am
Being for some­thing that is eco­nom­i­cally unfea­si­ble shows the greed of the left. “Give me what I want regard­less of the cost” is the war cry of the left.

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My2CentsWorth
August 20, 2010 at 6:54 am
Besides, mass tran­sit is avail­able now. Busses run all the time.

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Donald Red Bear Watkins
August 20, 2010 at 7:22 am
I’m refer­ring to Trains in addi­tion to buses.

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AlanB
August 21, 2010 at 10:24 pm
So let me see if I under­stand you cor­rectly. You’re opposed to pub­lic sub­si­dies, yet you want to see more buses, which require the some of largest pub­lic sub­si­dies, save things like demand response ser­vices (hand­i­capped & senior transportation).

On aver­age in this coun­try accord­ing to the National Tran­sit Data­base it costs 40 cents to move 1 per­son 1 mile on a com­muter train or a heavy rail train (sub­ways & El’s). To do the same job on light rail costs 60 cents per pas­sen­ger mile.

To move 1 per­son 1 mile on a bus costs 80 cents and that amount does not include fix­ing the dam­age that those thou­sands of buses cause to our roads. That later expense falls squarely on tax­payer shoul­ders, since pub­lic buses don’t pay fuel taxes.

And speak­ing of expenses falling on tax­payer shoul­ders, on aver­age the bus rider pays about 26.3% of the oper­at­ing costs.

The aver­age rail rider pays 52.8% of their oper­at­ing costs. Amtrak is actu­ally even higher, where rid­ers pay about 2/3rds of the entire bud­get, both cap­i­tal and oper­at­ing, which is actu­ally bet­ter than the 50% that dri­vers paid last year towards the highways.

So as a tax­payer who seems to be con­cerned about their taxes, why do you want the more expen­sive buses? Do you like pay 74% of 80 cents per pas­sen­ger mile?

Since you have no choice but to sup­port pub­lic tran­sit, wouldn’t you rather be pay­ing 47% of either 40 cents or 60 cents per pas­sen­ger mile?

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nash1945
August 20, 2010 at 7:33 am
The last time peo­ple were rounded up and sent to “camps” occurred dur­ing WW2 when the demo­c­rat party sent Amer­i­cans of Japan­ese decent to camps…So there is this coun­tries his­tory of “camps” in America.

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Odin29
August 20, 2010 at 7:48 am
I don’t think any of the peo­ple against this idea have ever rid­den a high speed train. They keep think­ing of the Amtrak trains, being pulled by con­verted freight loco­mo­tives ‚in rolling stock that is based on designs from years ago, on tracks shared by mile long coal trains. If you’d ever rid­den the TGV which trans­lates to Really Fast Train in French, you’d know that the only peo­ple who wouldn’t want the US to have high speed rail are air­lines. It was one of the coolest things I did over there. It was so smooth that I could have eas­ily fallen asleep if I hadn’t been try­ing to read road signs at 200mph.
The money is worth it. Peo­ple could live in Nashville or Smyrna etc and work in Atlanta or you could take a day trip to Chicago or New Orleans. It would change how we’re able to move around this huge coun­try of ours. If the US wants to stay dom­i­nate in the world eco­nom­i­cally then we need to invest in our­selves. Imag­ine a job mar­ket where any major city within 300 miles is legit­i­mate com­mut­ing dis­tance. What would our unem­ploy­ment rate be then?

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My2CentsWorth
August 20, 2010 at 2:40 pm
It is NOT worth the money regard­less of how cool it might be. And I don’t work for an airline.

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New2Nash
August 20, 2010 at 8:52 am
Excuse me. But, do any of those oppos­ing rail here actu­ally believe that our inter­states and road­ways are not being sup­ported by our tax dol­lars? Every form of trans­porta­tion out there is being sub­si­dized by pub­lic funds. It’s not like they are pure money mak­ers and rail is a money pit. You just have to do it right and get over that out-dated notion that pub­lic trans­porta­tion is just for poor peo­ple. At least on a train I can work, relax, etc…instead of being at atten­tion the entire time mak­ing sure I get to my des­ti­na­tion alive and in one piece.

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AlanB
August 21, 2010 at 10:40 pm
Thank you New2Nash!

You are quite cor­rect, all forms of trans­porta­tion get a sub­sidy, planes, trains, buses, and roads.

And any­one who has ever taken a ride on Amtrak’s North­east Cor­ri­dor know full well that they can find them­selves sit­ting on a train with actors, a Sen­a­tor, busi­ness peo­ple, fam­i­lies, and gen­er­ally any­one from all walks of life.

Take a ride on the #6 Sub­way line in NY City and you just might find your­self on the train with the 8th rich­est man in the world, Mayor Bloomberg. It’s a well pub­li­cized fact that he often takes the sub­way from his apart­ment down to City Hall, rather than mak­ing the tax­pay­ers foot the bill for the pri­vate car that as mayor he’s enti­tled to use.

And the sub­ways are full of plenty of other busi­ness peo­ple too!

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soso
August 20, 2010 at 10:52 am
I agree with Odin29. I recently moved from Nashville to be closer to fam­ily if they had had high speed trains and I could be in Nashville in under an hour I could have kept the job I loved and still been close to my fam­ily. I would def­i­nitely be inter­ested in high speed tran­sit but I do worry about the cost both from a tax­payer and rider stand­point but I believe that employ­ers might be will­ing to sub­si­dize the cost to get the right employee.
My brother and I have often talked about hav­ing high speed rail that linked all the major cities across the state: on the other hand, when has TN ever been that pro­gres­sive. I doubt it will ever get beyond the plan­ning stage unless big busi­ness in TN gets behind it.

Here’s hop­ing.

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bj1959
August 20, 2010 at 3:46 pm
Good to see my com­ments from this morn­ing are under moderation.

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jmjenkins
August 20, 2010 at 4:41 pm
Mine too. Appar­ently they are crack­ing down on “ad hominem” attacks, regard­less of who threw the first punch.

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bj1959
August 20, 2010 at 5:21 pm
So the last 18 months of our being called Nazis, racists, etc. they sud­denly decide to grow a back­bone? I doubt it, it will prob­a­bly just the ones they dis­agree with.

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jmjenkins
August 20, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Sadly, I think you are right. I repeat­edly flagged the post to which I was respond­ing and zip, zero, natha, noth­ing. If you bash Bush and con­ser­v­a­tives, that is just “free speech”, but if you bash Junior and the social­ists, that is not show­ing proper respect.

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Donald Red Bear Watkins
August 20, 2010 at 5:53 am
Don’t ride if you opt not to do so. I’d ride with pride.

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Donald Red Bear Watkins
August 20, 2010 at 7:23 am
It is no more offen­sive than some of the ban­ter I’ve heard from the Con­ser­v­a­tive crowd.

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bj1959
August 20, 2010 at 7:55 am
No, just “bru­tally honest”.