Happy 50th anniversary to the Interstate Highway system. I'm probably a little less enthusiastic about it than this guy, a little sadder about some of the small-town flavor of the country that it helped kill off. But there's no question about the ways in which it reshaped this country, and it was Big Government that did it. The federal government has always been a prime mover, so to speak, in this country's transportation development (as perhaps it should have been), from the early roads and its involvement with the railroads to today's highway funding and airport enabling. That's worth remembering in debates over issues such as Amtrak subsidies. It may or may not be a good idea to push rail travel, but let's at least not say it's an overreaching departure from the usual for the government.
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Not meaning to hijack the thread, but these days it is far more interesting to me to compare the merits of rail and air travel than rail and auto transport.
Maybe John Galt and friends were right after all. The Japanese have bullet trains now running hundreds of miles an hour, and Disney has had a local monorail serving Disneyland since the 50s like an upscale subway or L.
What we have, now, is an air travel industry deeply in the red and no particularly satisfactory alternative business model -- other than -- just maybe -- a potential resurgence of the American rail. It only needs a respectable sum of money in R&D and new lines to handle high-speed monos, mag-levs and whatever else is on the horizon.
If freshly hired TQM/6 Sigma managers can also guarantee these trains will run on time, I would be quite fascinated to ride an appropriately inexpensive, properly sound suppressed passenger rail car for a change.
Modern American public transport by rail would beat the bus all to h*11 (what the heck, invite the Greyhound logo to join the fun).
Rail could make it much harder for the airlines to recover, but in a country where competition is encouraged as a catalyst for innovation, I imagine the airlines would respond to this kind of new competition in a far healthier way than in the recent past.
Ah well, a musing and a ramble.