“Transit riders shouldered four times the share of the MTA 2008 budget disaster that drivers did …”

You changed it to:

“Transit riders shouldered four times the share of the MTA 2008 budget disaster [than] drivers did …”

His grammar was correct. Your fix is incorrect.

Rail transit acolytes and their desire for others to pay for their rail and transit fantasies.

Hunters and fishermen who for about 100 years have provide virtually all of the money for animal habitat and restoration in the USA. Yet these people welcome with open arms anyone to enjoy the beauty and largesse they have created.

I suspect this goes back to the underlying reasons that conservatives give substantially more to charity than do liberals.

Don’t forget why the non-users of transit have to pay in the first place: because they are morally inferior. I used to subscribe to the theory that the moral hierarchy went pedestrian> cyclist> transit rider> efficient car driver> SUV driver. Opportunity costs were never part of the equation. Not sure when I changed my tune, sometime after college and after I started eating meat again.

The most common complaint about the European model of train usage is that it is skewed towards passenger travel. They use trains to move people and roads to move cargo. While the US does the opposite.

You could increase passenger rail services throughout the US, but you’ll have to divert more cargo transport to roads.

Also, the population density argument works well too. Europe is dense enough that a 5 GBP per flight airline can be successful (I was going to say $25 per flight, but I just checked the RyanAir website, hachi machi!).

Based on an admittedly brief Google search, I came up with the following costs for travel in Europe:

Rail pass for 15 days for two people = $2000
Rental car for 15 days = $800
Gas = $6/gal.

So, assuming that the same amount of money is available for travel regardless of the choice of either train or car…

$2000 (rail) – $800 (car) = $1200 for gas
With gas @ $6/gal: $1200 / $6 = 200 gallons
Assuming 30mpg: 30mpg x 200 gal. = 6,000 mile driving
range
6,000 miles / 15 days = 400 miles per day

Obviously, there are way too many variables to make any sort of conclusion valid for everybody, but depending on your situation and preferences, I’m not seeing that European train travel is necessarily an improvement over travel by car.

Methinks nails it. I don’t know where you live gn, but you could fit all of Denmark in our COUNTY…yet our county has less than 1/1000 the population.
1) Outside New York city, America is big and spread out.
2) We work longer hours and less uniform shifts than Europeans, so it’s much harder to set a train schedule that maximizes ridership.
3) Most American cities don’t have one centralized commercial district where everyone works. Workplaces are spread out also. This is why buses are such a better urban option here. Buses can go anywhere you have roads, trains can only go where you spend the money to build their unique infrastructure.
4) Unions, unions, unions.

probably for the same reason that Amtrak’s only profitable line is the Northeast Corridor. They connect very densely populated areas over relatively short distances and European roads are often much shittier compared to U.S. roads.

Why do European cities do trains/transit right (do they?) and we do it so poorly?

http://www.franklygreen.com/my_weblog/2009/05/save-energy-take-the-car-column.html