Yeah, this. If it weren't for the bike I'd definitely never get any exercise.

If you found a place closer *enough* to the job, you could probably offset the other costs by ditching the car completely. Crazy idea, I know, but in most of the parts of the world where people don't have heart disease as a result of sedentary lifestyles, this is what they do to get around.

Isn't the point of a "contract" to make it impossible for someone to do this? Also, at $30/month it's hard to see how even what you describe would be a bad deal for the carrier.

And in the American mobile carrier market, surely even you must know that "take your business elsewhere" is BS. There is no competition here.

The trouble is, without net neutrality, we still get to live under the same spying, overbearing, over-regulating regimes, it's just that this regime happens to be a corporation instead of the government. At least we get to vote on the government.

You must mean before the Europeans started showing up...

This is a ridiculous argument. Citys and rural farms have coexisted since mankind invented agriculture because neither can survive without the other.

Chances are that if a farmer wants to do anything other than subsistence farming (which very few in the first world do), chances are that he or she is going to need a city in which to trade the food. And lets not forget that most of the technology that makes modern farming so very efficient was developed where? That's right: Cities.

And likewise the cities need the farms to grow their food. So tell me again why we're having this argument.

Anyway, the only part of this system that is truly indefensible is the suburbs.

Think about it this way: We need to put a large tax on gasoline NOT for the purpose of "controlling citizens" but instead as a method of paying for all of the externalized costs of using fossil fuel (such as wars in the Middle East, dealing with the effects of global warming, etc.). We can then hand that money directly back to the same citizens IN CASH so that they can use it as they see fit. If they still want to use it to pay for gas to drive everywhere, fine. They are free to do that. My bet is most will choose to pocket the money and ride a train or a bicycle.

Because it's substantially LESS subsidized than a) it needs to be and b) the other modes of transportation that it competes with (namely road and air transportation).

Secondly mozumder here. Putting the passenger trains on the freight lines is how we do it right now and, frankly, it's bad for both systems. Any serious effort at high speed rail in the United States is definitely going to have to involve building a substantial amount of new, exclusive right-of-way.

Hint: If we actually did it, instead of just talking about it, it would definitely work.

ALL of the land used in the major cities to build the interstate highway system was already occupied. That didn't stop us then. Why should this stop us now? Sure, it is expensive, but then so is any kind of major investment in infrastructure. If we keep putting necessary changes off because "they cost too much" pretty soon we will surely find ourselves "last in the world" in terms of the quality of that infrastructure.

I don't know about that.

The United States used to have a pretty extensive privately owned and operated rail system which lasted about a hundred years and went virtually everywhere.

The thing that put an end to that was neither the invention of the mass-produced car (The model T was introduced in 1908) nor the availability of cheap oil (~1880 until ~1970): It was the building (almost exclusively with federal money, and entirely with public dollars) of the interstate highway system, and the massive federally funded effort to pave all of the state routes (and most other roads) that took place after World War II.

Considering that at the time, the railroads had to pick up the cost of their own track building and maintenance, and pass that cost on to their customers, it's no wonder that within the next two decades our previously expansive and prosperous private railroad network had to be propped up by the federal government just to stay in existence.

All things considered the Big Dig was a pretty good deal if you consider what the project entailed. Yes, it had its cost overruns, but they were not significantly out of proportion with the overall size of the project compared to other projects of that size. By far the biggest reason that the final project cost was so far above the original estimate is that project took so long to complete that the value of the dollar fell by about 60% between the day they finalized the initial cost estimate and the day they opened the Central Artery tunnel.

That fair market price may start to seem like a lot more of a deal when oil returns to its $145/barrel peak price and air service becomes proportionally more expensive to compensate.

If we were to build a high speed rail line that was comparable speed-wise with the current state-of-the-art (about 175-200 mph, in China, currently), the ~790 mile journey from Chicago to New York in about 4 and a half hours. I firmly believe that if such a train existed, it would be more popular than the current air route which is, of course, one of the most popular in the world. Given that, I think it would also offset its obviously enormous cost in less time than it would take to pay it off.

And this is without even taking into account how the cost of air travel would be affected by the inevitable return of $145/barrel oil (which WILL come once the economy rebounds).