Adron,
The freight railroads pay at minimum 95+% of their infrastructure costs,

Not really. They have lots of long standing agreements that cut their costs significantly. Most of the Metrolink Ventura County line was rebuilt for less than free for instance. And don't even get me started on property taxes.

If this guy is stupid enough to live in Barstow, then why should his opinion be trusted on anything?

There. That was mean. And uncalled for. And I enjoyed it very much.

So why does one freight method get off almost free of charges and the other gets railed. By the time you look at freight railroads vs. trucking it is amazing they're still in business. They let Amtrak use their rails for almost nothing, eating up valuable time slots, they have to pay taxes on all that land, 18 wheeler and other road freight does none of this and gets taxed very little.

All that and they're now in Congress bitching about needed new refineries and other such things because the costs of more expensive "diesal" have hit them so hard. That's just bum luck since they're so inefficient at carrying cargo. Tough, deal with it, let the system that is more efficient and more cost conscious (rail) easily take care of the long hauls and stick to the shorter drives.

...but I digress...

Road users should cover 100% of their utilization. Just that change would cause so much more pricing power in transit it would again take over and become a dominant presence.

The amount of money something like Caltrain could make by doubling their ticket prices and still being relatively cheap in comparison to auto use would be massive.

Amtrak would easily be able to reap hundreds of millions of profits even with their inefficient utilization of the system they're running.

...oh the mind screw of it all.

ugh.

btw - Good blog. Keep up the interesting material. :)

Actually all I did was correct a common misperception about SUVs.

Truth be told i wouldn't have made half the claims in this letter. What the designers didn't count on when designing the IHS and its' associated NHS designees was capacity and commercial transport. Additionally, while not their fault, they couldn't do much about the midstream political repurposing to serve city cores contrary to the original desire of the big cities and how the system was envisioned.

I would mildly support the claim of total life energy tradeoffs and the multiple vehicle for certain trips assertions. Both have just enough truth to prevent summary dismissal.

The guy lives in Barstow. How many of the few he started with could be left?

BTW, Al Gore is not a "red herring" just red.

When measuring the "safety" of a vehicle in a regulatory context, we really need a metric that includes not only the consequences for the people inside the vehicle in question, but also the vehicle's effects on everyone else. Similarly, what if the fines for moving violations scaled with the mass of your vehicle? Or even better, its kinetic energy (0.5*m*v*v). Cyclists should be ticketed for breaking the law, sure, but the average negative consequences of their bad behavior are so much smaller than those of someone in a Hummer it seems ludicrous that they should both be subject to the same fines.

But other than his acknowledgment of my youth and vibrancy, Nick is wrong on every other account. His most glaring error is the assumption that I don't LOVE Del Taco.

furthermore - i wonder what life is like, for nick benson. seeing things so black and white. it must be really nice to not see the inherent complexities of the world.

with his habits, he'll be lucky to live to 51, not 91.