Comments by "Rob MacKay" (@rrmackay) on "Inside America’s First High Speed Rail" video.

Its not just the automobile lobby, its the government lobby, Amtrak thinks they should own all passenger railways even though they are horrible at operating them. Building new lines can't happen under government because huge federal contractors want extendable contracts based on time and materials instead of fixed cost.
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US Governments are incapable of actually pulling off a project like that. The transcontinental railway was built by Union Pacific for profit not by government. The US government has never built railroads, but it has provided land grants and subsidies to private companies to build them.
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@TheGreatAtario Do you not think that government departments lobby each other - you have obviously never worked in D.C.
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@MBrieger My point which I stand by is that US governments have never successfully built a rail line. Most metro areas can't even run a fully publicly funded light rail system without losing money, i.e. running a deficit every year.
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The high cost of rail transport is completely caused by government. When the first mail deliver ferry was put into service in NYC it was free to deliver a message or ride the ferry, the cost of operations were covered by concessions. If you want it to be free don't let government touch it.
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@MBrieger I said US government genius.
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The US government has never built railroads, but it has provided land grants and subsidies to private companies to build them. The Miami high speed rail project cost 5bn to build, California conversely spent 10bn on high speed rail and never build a single track. Private industry is the way to go when it comes to building rail lines.
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@JD-pe7sx make all the excuses you want, China makes rail lines, America makes excuses.
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@JD-pe7sx get a life, it was a sarcastic joke but by all means be a douche.
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@TheGreatAtario your truly dense aren't you, there is non stop inter department negotiations and deals being made every day No they don't hire a lobbying firm but they all have full time staff that are "liaisons" to other agencies. The end result is dedicated staff to lobby other departments. The "official channels " is nothing but a staff lobbyist called a liaison. Im not going to tell you anything more than you don't know what your talking about.
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@Bob-w2b8j in the 1800s private mail carriers competing with the US postal service beat government pricing and service to the point that congress outlawed competing with the USPS. Same story with Amtrak.
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@CraigFThompson GFY - if you don't know what that means refer to Musk vs Iger
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American history shows us that private companies are the ones best suited to build railroads. Every government in the US that tried to build a railway has failed, spectacularly! why do people continue to think that government can actually deliver a high speed rail I will never understand.
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