Why Do Conservatives Hate Trains?
9th March 2011
Megan McArdle responds to David Weigel, statist whiner.
I myself like rail, and think that the culture-war rhetoric with which conservatives frequently reject it is out-of-proportion to its importance in the grand political scheme of things. At the same time, I don’t think that rail is going to work at anything close to a decent cost-benefit ratio in most of America, and I thought that the idea of running a train from Busch Gardens to Disney was fairly insane–high speed rail takes a lot of time and energy to accelerate (and brake), so the shorter the route, the less benefit it offers to either riders or the environment.
The elephant in the room, of course, is that trains are an outdated technology and inferior the the automobile, which enables personal freedom. Personal freedom is what statists hate most.
March 11th, 2011 at 01:01
I like trains and wish it were possible to use them more for moving about in my life. Unfortunately, there is currently no way for me to go from A to B without going through the entire rest of the alphabet most of the time if I want to go somewhere and many times my desired destination simply isn’t available (such as my job). If the rocket scientists who ran DART into Pleasant Grove had thought ahead enough to build a light rail loop around LBJ I would probably use it now. Oh well, so much for that brilliant idea.
March 11th, 2011 at 04:35
And that’s the essential problem with trains. They’re great for going from the periphery to the core when that’s what most people want to do; New York City and Washington D.C. are perfect venues for trains. And they’re great when you want to go from one city core to another city core, which is why all the old train stations are right downtown. But that’s not what people do these days. The reason why automobiles are the cornerstone of the modern economy is because they allow individuals the freedom to go where they want to, when they want to, with only minimal consideration for what other people want to do. People just aren’t willing to give up that freedom.