Originally Posted by SeattleSUP:
Originally Posted by Bobby Ogage:
My guess is that this fiasco is another government failure to get things right.
Yeah, governments never get anything right. Thank goodness here in the good old US of A our glorious free market system has given us far superior choices through the miracle of market competition.
Oh wait, we have no high speed rail in the US (Acela is a joke). If I want to travel from SF to LA or NYC to Boston or Minneapolis to Chicago my "free market" choices are a long car drive over crappy roads or paying through the nose to fly on a crowded, uncomfortable airplane after first spending an hour or more dealing with the security theater we have in our airports. Hmmm....given a choice I'd happily take the socialist high speed rail option! Seriously, have you ever used the high speed rail networks in Europe? For distances of 100-500 miles they're vastly superior to what we have in our country. Better seats, more legroom, no need to take off your shoes, faster, cheaper - pretty much superior in every way to any American airline.
PS - the TGV lines are actually profitable.
It always cracks me up when I hear the "it takes the government to foul up", as if the private sector is this miraculous thing..from the private sector that brought us the Edsel, the Chevy Vega, that bought us the US auto industry with all their great decisions,and anyone who has read a Dilbert comic strip knows what corporations and businesses often do. My dad worked for a defense contractor as an engineer, and they had problems with the units they were making (test units for aircraft), the design was faulty, in part because of decisions made by beancounters, and as a result they had issues with grounding and possible electrocution. One genius of a finance type said "well, why don't we just put stickers on them, saying there is a shock problem".
As far as "business knowing", take a look at the railroads history. Janney developed the knuckle coupler, westinghouse the air break, and the 'geniuses' on the railroads refused to use them, saying they 'cost too much'. They were finally forced to use them by the big,bad government in 1890, and low and behold, the 'geniuses' discovered that with air brakes and knuckle couplers they could transport more cargo and passengers, faster, safer, without lawsuits over lost cargo,and made a ton of money..but they were smart, right?
Actually, if they were doing this to force change to the stations, there is precedent. Pullman built his prototype sleeper car before the civil war, and the problem was it was too wide for many stations. When lincoln was assasinated, they used Pullman's cars to handle the funeral train, and a lot of stations had to be redone to allow it to pass through, which kind of helped Pullman.
Not saying the government is always brilliant, but these kinds of snafus are just as common in private industry, the only difference is private industry mistakes tend to be buried along with the morons who make them, they never see light of day.
Not to mention, of course, that prior to 1880 there were some ridiculous number of track gauges in the US that made shipping cargo or passengers ridiculously stupid, and it was deliberate, the railroads (private companies, mind you) thought that it was a lot more profitable to force cargo and such to be switched between railroads, rather than negotiating through transport over standard gauge..and they were wrong, lot more profitable after the gauge had been made standard, by government decree.
