Quote:

The solution to this is simple. You do what those of us commuters in Chicago do, you adjust your life to fit with the scheduled train service. You get out of bed early or you schedule your meetings for late in the morning. It is not hard.

That presumes you have control over the scheduling of the meetings. In at
least one case, the event I wanted to attend was a meeting in Washington,
DC. The people putting on the presentation were certainly not going to
change the timing for me.

Yes, I have in fact taken the Crescent out of Greensboro, NC, in the middle
of the night -- quite a few years ago.


The population of the U.S. is getting older. I've been on the plus side of 60
myself for some time now. I can still drive ten hours to get somewhere, if
necessary. But, I'd rather not, if there's another option. And, yes, there
are people who do not have cars or for whom driving is not an option, for a
variety of reasons.


Between my hometown of Durham, NC, and nearby Raleigh, there are sections of
interstate 40 that are five lanes in each direction. And, during rush hour,
the highway is so congested that traffic is either at a crawl or standstill at
times.

The highway system (which is already in bad shape) has reached the point where
simply adding more and more lanes doesn't do any good. Ever been on a busy
interestate and realized that the exit you want to take is in about two miles --
and you're in the third lane from the outside and the traffic is so bad that you
cannot get into the right hand lane before the exit?

In many cases, it is easier and cheaper to add capacity to existing rail lines
than to build more lanes of Interstate. The freight railroads are willing to
work with that, as long as, in the end, they come out ahead on infrastructure
for their own use, too.

Article in Mass Transit magazine on mixed use rail

-- Ernest