High-Speed Trains?

What is wrong with America? Why are we in this state of paralysis? High-speed trains have been built in many countries of the world, and yet America continues to hunker down inside its cars while our infrastructure just crumbles away!

What's that? We're at war? Oh, we can't afford to do anything besides wage war? Oh. Right. Sure.

California Gov. Ah-nold Schwarzenegger is fully behind a high-speed train system linking San Diego to San Francisco, and it looks like things are happening there. Barack Obama is talking about high-speed trains linking major cities across the country, but he won't be able to do anything until we get more Republicans out of office, restore some sanity and stop this insane "war."

In Texas, we've been talking about linking Houston/Galveston to Dallas to San Antonio/Austin for years and years with high-speed trains, and nothing, that is NOTHING, is happening on that score. What do we do instead? Plan more freeways. Brilliant.

You may have heard of the Trans-Texas Corridor, which is planned to link Laredo in the southwest part of the state with Texarkana in the northeast, with links to McAllen and Brownsville. Some people are calling this the NAFTA Superhighway. A lot of people (here and here, among many others, and me among them) don't think it's a very good idea. Just wait till they hear the "number" of that planned road - I-69. Ohmigod! It conjures up images of...of...SEX! Can't have that!

The current plan is to have a freight-train line down the middle of the Corridor, but I'll just betcha that they scrap those plans, like they did with the plans for Interstate 10 west from Houston. Years ago we agreed on absurd plans to build a 24-lane freeway from Houston to Katy, with a train line down the middle for commuters.

Naturally, eventually, the plan was changed to delete the train line and replace it with commuter buses. Now, we're in the middle of that project and the highway has been chaotically under construction seemingly forever, with another several years of construction still to go. And by the time it's finished, well, whudda-yaknow, there will be tons more subdivisions built to put more cars on the freeway, and it will be stuffed to capacity again.

We used to have vision in this country. We used to be on the cutting edge. We sent men to the freakin' moon. Now we're just fat, lazy, driving insanely huge cars, and have fallen behind the rest of the world in so many categories, while we continue to wage a stupid war and put practically all of our energy into weapons production. Surely we can do better than this, but not until we get the corporate fascists out of power. And that includes some Democrats too.