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Mr Matt
join:2008-01-29
Eustis, FL
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1 edit | Did McSlarrow sleep through history class in Junior High?  Obviously McSlarrow does not remember why the Interstate Commerce Commission was formed in 1887! Here is an excerpt from an article in Wikipedia:
"The creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission was the result of widespread and longstanding anti-railroad agitation. Western farmers, specifically those of the Grange Movement, were the dominant force behind the unrest, but Westerners generally — especially those in rural areas — believed that the railroads possessed economic power that they systematically abused. A central issue was rate discrimination between similarly situated customers and communities. Other potent issues included alleged attempts by railroads to obtain influence over city and state governments and the widespread practice of granting free transportation in the form of yearly passes to opinion leaders (elected officials, newspaper editors, ministers, and so on) so as to dampen any opposition to railroad practices. Some behavior was presumably less common; the reporter Charles Edward Russell claimed that the railroad that served his hometown had refused to ship newsprint to a newspaper editor because the editor had attacked the railroad in print."
See complete article here: »en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate···mmission
Sounds familiar does it not. Just change the word railroads to cable companies and yearly passes to campaign contributions and you will find many parallels with present day issues with the broadband ISP's. All we need now is an agency that is not subservient to the industry that it regulates, and will put their charges on a short leash. | | |
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patcat88
join:2002-04-05
Jamaica, NY
kudos:1 | said by Mr Matt:Sounds familiar does it not. Just change the word railroads to cable companies and yearly passes to campaign contributions and you will find many parallels with present day issues with the broadband ISP's. All we need now is an agency that is not subservient to the industry that it regulates, and will put their charges on a short leash. But 80 years later they destroyed/reduced to mass bankruptcy the industry that they regulated. | |
| said by patcat88:But 80 years later they destroyed/reduced to mass bankruptcy the industry that they regulated. It's a sad story, and not one many seem to know about either.
The railroad barons were hardly innocent (they weren't called barons nothing), but what the government did to railroads in the second half of the 20th century was unconscionable.
We once had world's greatest rail system. It had over 300,000 route miles, and reached every major part of the country. And with the exception of a lot of free land to build it out (not that big of a deal, those areas gained far more value by receiving rail service), it was paid for with largely private money. Railroads are the only form of transportation to pay their own way.
Today we only have about 147,000 route miles, and much of what remains is in piss poor condition. Think about that, almost half of the rail network since its peak has been abandoned. Branch lines jettisoned, communities no longer receive service. All those important rail corridors are gone for good. We'll never have a rail system that big again.
Much of this is due to ICC/STB rules and federal law concerning railroads, but also unprecedented government intervention in the market. The Federal, State, and Local governments have collectively spent trillions of dollars over the last 60 years financing, building, owning, maintaining, and subsidizing an aviation and road system.
No privately owned mode of transportation can compete with that. Why would anyone sane person replace the most efficient form of transportation ever created and paid for itself with private dollars, with something that was less efficient, had higher environmental and financial costs, and required untold public subsidies?
No other country has done anything quite like this. Most other countries publicly own their railroads, and its considered a first class mode of transport along with aviation, roads, and waterways. And thus, deserving of capital investments by the public.
Europe and Japan had their rail systems destroyed by WW2. Yet they systematically rebuilt their rail system, while we dismantled ours. As a result they have extensive electric high speed rail lines throughout, and we don't. All in the name of progress.
China is going through the biggest rail boom in the world in over a century. They're spending ~$1 trillion building about 10,000 miles of new rail lines over the next 20 years, including thousands of miles of high speed rail (HSR). Their HSR network will reach almost all their major regions, and will soon have more miles of HSR than the rest of the world combined.
It makes me wonder what could have been. | |
Mr Matt
join:2008-01-29
Eustis, FL
kudos:1 Reviews:
·CenturyLink
·Comcast
·Embarq Now Centu..
·Millenicom
|  Sadly the Cold War was a major cause of the failure of the US Railroad System. General Dwight Eisenhower spent a lot of time in Germany after WWII and saw the advantage of the Autobahn. When he became President he remembered of how the Nazis used the Autobahn to move troops and munitions efficiently. Railroads were easy to disable, roads on the other hand were not. In the event the cold war turned into a hot war, the government could nationalize the airlines and use the highway system to move troops and munitions where needed. | |
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