politics

The scammer who singlehandedly killed US high-speed rail with his impossible fantasy hyperloop bullshit that caused hundreds of idiots to invest billions of dollars into technology that any third grader could tell you was bullshit says that US rail is terrible?

Color me surprised

Don't get me wrong, it IS terrible, but he is part of the various reasons why it's terrible.

Wanna make the US better?

Look at Europe, for starters. Make walkable and cyclable cities that are designed for humans not for cars. Then have normal speed (< 200kph) trains on an hourly or even half hourly service between neighboring cities. Add High speed tracks between states with services every few hours and have busses for mid distance.

Then start reducing road width because you don't need 20 lanes anymore all of the sudden

Whatever you do, though, do NOT listen to what this scammer wants

My understanding is that Amtrak is what happened when the private railroad operators were failing, and the govt needed to step in to stop the passenger railroad network from collapsing completely.

Its by and large not profitable. Air travel, for better or worse, eats its lunch.

he criticized U.S. passenger rail as “embarrassing” compared to other countries.

He's actually right about that but 100% wrong about why: US passenger rail is embarrassing due to

• a pitiful lack of political will for public investment in it (in spite of the vast majority of the population being in favor),
• billionaires like himself and others with competing interests spending ridiculous amounts of money lobbying against it
• private and ridiculously under-regulated freight companies (such as Norfolk Southern of East Palestine catastrophe infamy) being allowed to privately own the tracks that tax funded public works projects built, and thus setting schedules and speeds that are not conducive to effective passenger transit.

In short, the Apartheid Nepo Nazi wants to pretend to fix it by doing more of what ruined it.

While Musk didn’t outline steps for privatization

Simple, just pull the rails and sell them one by one at an auction, what could go wrong?

I'd like to see Musk on a crowded train

ever since germany privatised rail (and post) while remaining mayority shareholder it has become ultra shit.

quality and reliability has gone down extremely over the years. efforts to mitigate the damage done thanks to neglect probably cost much more than proper maintenence would have cost them. those efforts are paid for by the state ofc.

deutsche bahn is so unreliable, neighbouring states have to cope with them disrupting their own schedules. if anything its reliably unreliable

but you already have a shitty underfunded rail system, so not much change there. the post office on the other hand will be heavily noticeable

Alternatively, let's nationalize Starlink

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference, Elon Musk criticized U.S. passenger rail as “embarrassing” compared to other countries.

Elon Musk? The same Elon Musk who helped cancel a high-speed rail transit project by touting his quickly-abandoned, far-fetched sci-fi transit system?

Rail (and public transport) should be publically owned. As someone who lives in Victoria, Australia, it is painfully obvious just how much damage the privitisation of our rail system in the 90s did. There was virtually no investment/expansion of the network for over two decades and it's now too late - we're stuck continually playing catch-up to the increasing infrastructure demands of our cities.

I'm not familiar with the ownership of Amtrak, but it should be fully government owned and operated. A vertically-integrated transport system was the most cost-effective approach for us and that lasted about a century before the more conservative of our two major parties sold it off.

I'll see if I can find something newer

It's worth noting that they're never talking about actual privatization, which is when a thing that was formerly a government service is turned over to private enterprise, but a grotesquely inefficient hybrid system in which the service is still funded by the government, and the only thing that changes is that rather than the budget being turned over to a government agency, it's turned over to whichever private contractor offers the best bribe and kickback package.

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference, he criticized U.S. passenger rail as “embarrassing” compared to other countries.

Well we agree on one thing, we just disagree greatly on the reasoning...

I guess no one told him that Amtrak pretty much is privatized.

Personally, I think it would be better to keep Amtrak majority state owned and throw billions of dollars at it. In fact, why not send out a $3 trillion stimulus package to get some Jobs going?

I call for Elon Musk to bite me.

Yeah well I say, musk should be forced to run a camshow called “my little teapot”.

And I have just as much authority as he does, so I guess he’s doing the camshow now.

Let me guess he's making a new conglomerate that will own all these once public services and resources. Perhaps he could call it ''XX Farban'''