I really don’t understand the argument that if passenger trains can’t operate at a profit, they should go out of business. That’s what the Libertarians and the people presenting the Trump budget are saying: mass transit, commuter trains and Amtrak’s long-distance trains all lose money, therefore eliminate their federal subsidies and let ’em sink or…
For passengers riding BART—that’s the Bay Area Rapid Transit system connecting San Francisco with Oakland and many other points in the Bay Area—a 44-year-old annoyance may soon be a thing of the past. Anyone who has ridden BART knows that there are loud screeching noises when the trains pass through many of the curves…
Municipal transit systems have been around for a long time. The New York City subway system opened in 1868, but an elevated segment was actually operating five years before that. During my trans-Siberian train experience three years ago, I was surprised to find that several of the cities we visited in Siberia had extensive metro…
In the late 1950s, the first talks began about designing and building a commuter rail system connecting the metropolitan areas around the Bay Area and linking everything to San Francisco. The idea was ambitious and visionary. The vocal opponents proclaimed that ridership estimates had been inflated, that cost estimates had been minimized, and that crippling…