Let them eat gas.

Will Folks has another of his brainwaves: trains are socialist.

Passenger trains, that is.

It's a commonplace that people who live where there's little or no train service begrudge other areas who do have it.

So Amtrak, which barely manages to serve SC, is an object of the all-knowing Folksy's scorn.

What he doesn't mention is that Congressional conservatives have spent forty years trying to hobble Amtrak if not kill it off entirely. They make passenger trains give way to freight trains, making  Amtrak schedules unreliable, then complain that Amtrak can't keep to a schedule. They oppose track upgrade funding so trains built to run way above track capacity can run slowly. Then they complain that the trains are slow. They oppose rolling stock upgrades, and complain that the carriages are crap. Except in the corridors- mostly the Northeast and Northwest- where modern trains actually work, and there they complain such up-to-date equipment is a needless luxury.

The fact is, trains take an enormous number of cars off the road. When Waldo lived in Seattle, he could get on the train in the morning, travel a couple of hours to Portland, get his bidness done, and be back in time for dinner. Cheaper- and faster- than doing the I-5 nightmare, which now includes a constant traffic jam where some wingnut has erected a panoply of his personal selection of religious and historical figures on humongous pedestals. Not to mention the Tacoma maze of on-and off ramps.

The brilliant thing about trains is they get to use their own routes. They carry hundreds- if not thousands- of people at a time. In the late 1970s Waldo used to take a train to London, the Tube to another station, another train to Dover, then the Channel ferry, then another train to Paris.

Now you can go from London to Paris by train in about three hours. If we are the shining city on the hill- the exceptionalist nation- why does everyone else  have vastly better public transit than we do? China- for God's sake-has a dazzling array of bullet train services between all its major cities. When California sought tenders for a bullet service, Chinese companies were the leaders in bidding.

Why do we have to be the stupid nation?

Part of it is the antispending, tokenist prattle of the likes of Folks. It's easy to attack something that doesn't serve you because you don't want to fund it to. Part of it is the latent racism in which the unspoken fear is that on any form of public transit you will have to sit with- or near- whatever The Other of the day is.

In 1885 you could travel from Portland, Oregon to Eugene, Oregon faster than you can make the same journey by car today.

Next time you are menaced by gigantic freight trucks on the highway, consider the CSX ads that point how more much stuff they can move per mile on a gallon of fuel.

It makes way more sense than endlessly expanding roads that will just fill up again.

Unless, of course, you work for road contractors. Or your paymasters do.