Huh?? Last I heard, outside the northeast corridor these trains were being moved by diesel engines. Diesel fuel is a petroleum product. There may even be some oil fired power plants feeding the juice in the catenary for all I know.
I want to make the point that I do not want to pay $5 per gallon of gas whether it is because of market prices or by taxation. However, IMHO I think it is inevitable at some point. The best way to prepare is to slowly raise the price thru taxation (like all the other developed countires of the world have already done...and BTW way have the better passenger rail transportation systems). This allows stability of the price of fuel which makes planning possible, better MPG cars, investing in mass transit, etc.
The other option is a revenue neutral tax. In that scenario, the revenues from the tax would simply be divided up equally among taxpayers and returned to them. So as long as you're not using more gas in a year than the average American, you actually wouldn't be paying additional prices at all, since you would be refunded the tax you paid. However, it creates an obvious incentive to conserve. And keep in mind that a gas tax lowers the actual price of fuel by reducing demand - several studies have been done that show that adding $1 to the cost of gas only increases out of pocket costs by about .70-.80.
Yeah, I remember in high school filling up my parent's Datsun for about $3 (10 gallon tank). And that was only about a year or two before the first "oil shock" in the fall of 1973.
St. Louis has arguably a better connection than several of the above. Portland and Miami not bad either. Champaign, Illinois outstanding for bus connections. And so on. Before you generalize, investigate.
That's inflation. 30 cents multiples ten-fold, to three dollars. $500 quadruples, to $2000.
And that in eight words is a good summary of what is wrong with our country.
Exactly. I don't think rising to $5.00 a gallon will have much impact at all on vehicle use. It would have to go much higher than that, before any serious curtailment would occur.
Yeah, where's Ross Rowland and his 'ACE 3000' steam locomotive when we need him? :help: :lol:
IMHO I think when it takes $100 to fill up your gas tank it will make an impact.
I disagree - I don't have time to look it up now, but the stats for how many vehicle miles were travelled in the last few years showed a noticiable reduction in miles driven when gas got above $4.00.
Some of us are already there!!!
Correct!
Well, at least in the case of Amtrak, what's telling is the LD routes being up as much as they are compared to shorter runs. I discussed this elsewhere, but Amtrak's longer runs have made a lot of ground in the last few years.Correct!
When gas hit $4.00 in 2008, ridership on all forms of public transit (including buses) spiked much higher. It was that spike that when coupled with the recession that made it appear that transit ridership had dropped last year. However, if one compares 2009 numbers to the 2007 numbers, ridership is actually still going up despite the recession. It was the abnormal increase in 2008 from the high gas prices that made it look like people weren't riding as much.
And miles driven on highways in 2007 were 3,032,399,000,000. In 2008 it had dropped to 2,973,509,000,000 because of the high price of gas that year. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics hasn't updated their tables to include the 2009 numbers, but I seem to recall seeing a news story that I cannot find right now that indicated that miles driven hadn't rebounded.
I wonder how the open market price for oil actually affects the price of gas, since there are many oil sources which have their prices locked (by contracts, treaties, etc).
Time efficiency is a big issue. For example, I took the Metro and bus to a friend's house in DC today. Even accounting for missing one of the buses due to confusion, which added 30 minutes to my trip, it was a clumsy 90 minutes or so from deboarding the Amtrak to getting to their house. Driving would've been 40-55 minutes faster depending on traffic. Similarly, on the NPN-WAS run, the train takes an extra 45 minutes to an hour depending on traffic. The simple fact is that public transportation ends up being far less efficient in terms of time spent en route outside of rush hour, notwithstanding cost issues...and the public transportation issues in DC are in a relatively good transport system. In Southern VA, public transport is simply a joke.
Hampton Roads has an additional problem: We've got enough train tracks used irregularly sitting around that you could build a train system off of it...but for one little problem called the James River, which it takes over $1 billion to stick two lanes across these days. A rail link would be similarly expensive.Any city smaller than 2 million metro is going to have that problem. Too many people for the roads, not enough tax dollars to support better infrastructure.
Biking remains an option
