Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

It’s low-quality journalism. The actual report says that HSR competes with metro-to-metro air travel, and explicitly contrasts it to commuter rail. It says that when managed poorly,—for example, trying to serve too many communities—HSR ends up as an expensive version of commuter rail, which is a failure.

About 3/4 of all domestic airline profits are accounted for by business travel. You are bad at this.

Business travel != commuting. And you still haven’t provided a source for that claim.

> what sort of ticket/buyer do you think accounts for the bulk of domestic airlines' revenues?

Provide a source specifically for commuting accounting for a majority of revenue, which was your original claim.

Moving the goal posts and saying the equivalent of “trust me bro” does not a compelling argument make.

I think the Homestead Act is a good example for explaining my objection.

First of all, I believe the government is the agent and servant of the people, not the other way around. Any government land is also owned by the people because the people own the government. The Homestead Act was a simple way of Distributing this land to to be held directly by the people instead of managing it on their behalf.

When considering the giving away of land, the government loses property. What the government gains is the hope or chance that people will do something productive with it. Even if those people only benefit themselves and retain the profits, they are increasing the economy and total wealth/value of the country. This is the repayment, and those individuals dont "owe" the government anything.

What I especially object to is the idea of retrospectively applied debt, often long after the fact.

You see this a lot in discussion of government grants for science and tech research.

The government creates and awards research grants to encourage development because the public would be better off if the medicine or whatever exists opposed to not exist, even if it is being sold for a profit.

However, when something does get invented and sold, some people then think the public is owed a debt. This isn't true. The government provided funding because it wanted the thing to exist. Once it exists, the government's objective and any obligation has already been met.

By analogy, imagine two neighbors. Neighbor A pays for the other (Neighbor B) to paint their house out of self interest, because it will make the neighborhood look better and raise their own property value. The neighbor B has fulfilled their obligation and any debt by painting the house. It is both logically and morally bankrupt for Neighbor A to come back at a later day and claim the other is in their debt, after they already got what they initially wanted and bargained for.

This comes back to the idea of the government as the "source" of all wealth, deserving repayment.

Like I said before, the government is important, and even essential for economic development.

Being essential is different than being the "source" or deserving repayment. A government built road is essential for me to get to work, however that doesn't mean the government is the source of all the work I did, or entitled to a share of my salary, provided I already paid my share for the road.

> i'll ignore the infrastructure costs, it's free to drive on I-5 after all.

Ugh. Like I said. =\

We aren’t building a new city with no initial infrastructure. This isn’t Sim City. And we aren’t rebuilding after getting firebombed and flattened in WW2. What we do have is an actually pretty good interstate highway system that was built in the 50s by eradicating minority neighborhoods and rampant use of eminent domain.

The only relevant question “given where we are today, what makes sense”. How much does it cost to go from where we are to a rich and robust train system?

So, we have a bunch of highways that require maintenance/growth and a bunch of train track that needs to be built. If you want to move budget from highway maintenance to train track construction and maintenance that’s totally cool. But you can’t just handwave it away.

I’ve read all the articles about why America sucks at building rail and what the per mile cost is.

So. Napkin math. How much to build, operate, and maintain a high-speed rail system in the PNW. Full system costs. Face value. With zero complaining or snark about how much we spend on cars/highways today.