2) The creation of a national mass transit system.
Now this is something I can't believe anyone has hit on. Ryan, how's traffic in Vegas? How would it be if fuel cost half what it does now? If we look at the elimination of petroleum imports as a national security move as opposed to environmental, then we need to look at national mass transit as just freaking practical. The interstates were a good thing sixty years ago. Now... We can spend trillions rebuilding something doomed to fail, or we can do what needs to be done and do it right.
City to city bullet trains, then inner-city trolleys, cable cars, trains, shit that gets vehicles and people off the roads. (Notice how I don't say buses or taxis? They serve a different purpose and aren't considered "mass transit" in the New Deal. At most a bus can haul thirty, where a train can haul hundreds. THAT'S mass transit.) Some cities are doing this on their own, which is good. It just needs to go to the next step.
Something conspicuously absent in my musings? Airplanes and the like? Well, costs should fall with the cost of fuel dropping, but whether or not the companies can handle volume is a large question mark. The bullet train links between metropolitan areas will relieve some of the pressure on the airlines but not eliminate the need for flying. The New Deal likes planes. Especially flying with home grown avgas. But the airline industry can't handle the increasing load alone.
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Now THIS is New Deal material… taking existing technology and capabilities and incorporating them in new and innovative ways.
Who can doubt that every sizable city in the country has an existing network of rail coming into and out of several parts of the city limits? The agency responsible for the construction of these “city to city” links would only have to spend what was needed to make sure the tracks complied with any new specs the fast, “bullet” trains might require… and terminals, of course. Still, what major metropolitan centers don’t still have Grand Centrals, or Union Stations, or a Great Northern terminal still servicing Amtrak passengers (if there are still any)? New York, Boston, Chicago, St Louis, Denver, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth… all the way to the Pacific… the network is there. At speeds of anywhere from 35 mph to 240 mph, the Tokyo Metro System moves more than 7 million people daily into and out of the city of Tokyo. This is existing technology that could be applied in intra-metro settings like Chicago to Minneapolis, with stops in two or three major metros between, making the trip from city center to city center a mere 2.5 hours from the current 6.5 hours it takes now… and never interrupting commuter or freight traffic at all. If this could be accomplished twice a day, round trip, it would cost each passenger less than $75 a trip. That’s about what it costs me to fill up my truck’s gas tank, which will let me drive for about 400 miles before running dry.
Why hasn’t this been implemented in such major population areas as the eastern seaboard of Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Washington-Baltimore? Or the Pacific coast from San Francisco to San Diego? Or Chicago-St Louis-Memphis-New Orleans? Imagine a trip from Chicago to New Orleans in less than 5 hours? And for only $186 a seat? You’d be hard pressed to find an airline that could do it for less, in less time!
I am nearly convinced that a hybrid-electric train capable of sustained speeds of 240 mph could run for the same cost as a large commercial airliner… carrying as much as three times the passengers (I read this somewhere, but I’ll have to find out where). Only 3 or four commercial airliners are truly big enough to contest a train… and they are still topping out at between 500 and 750 passengers, and requiring 82,000 gallons of fuel for each flight on average (http://www.airbus.com/en/). Since the average airliner carries only 188 passengers, and averages more than $370 per seat (that’s with a required 10 day notice), how could this NOT be cheaper for all involved?
I like this idea.
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