As A Dutchie, I love this campaign! Our railroads end up very well-maintained and very reliable in part thanks to NS/Prorail, which are 100% state-owned. Without them, it would basically be impossible to even live anywhere near a railroad because of derailments and accidents caused by preventable damage to tracks and trains.
I just saw that video "Urban Planning RU-vid has a HUGE Problem," and I was rather confused as I always thought urbanist RU-vid seemed concerned with motivating people to get engaged in improving their communities. Maybe it isn't always at the forefront, but the intent is definitely there. Your channel was one of the first I thought of. It's important to think of how we can impact our communities on a local scale, but we should never stop dreaming big. Time to NATIONALIZE!
Promoting Construction Company Profits, appears to be the purpose of Urban Planners. The development of more fancy buildings to produce exotic profits becomes the purpose of Urban Planning. When the Money expires the Opportunists will be thinned out drastically. The US Currency is about to face some harsh questions. Who supports the value of the Currency? How do they expect to cover $200 trillion of Nations Debts? Where are the profits to support the use of Capital now going to appear? The US is a Consumer Country, 70% of the GDP is determined by Consumer Spending. Consumers are now $17 trillion in the hole. This appears to be an unsustainable system.
My only issue was they abandoned so many parallel routes. Many of which today could be used today to alleviate congestion or have dedicated passenger lines.
The "Profits" they produced were insufficient to keep the Investors interested. The Shareholders are served before any of the Customers. That is how the system failed to serve those it was chartered to work for.
Not even just parallel routes. Columbus, GA, a fairly large city (300k metro area, almost 500k including Auburn, AL and other outlying areas) one hundred miles from Atlanta, has had *both* of its main links between them abandoned since the 1980s. CSG-ATL would be a great intercity corridor but there’s nowhere to run the trains except maybe northwest to Opelika and then to Atlanta by the West Point Route. Need anything shipped to Atlanta? That’s I-185’s job. Need it there quick? There’s an airport I guess, but to restore the rail lines you’s have to rip out bicycle paths.
@@DiamondKingStudios interesting how poor of choices that were made across the board. My specific thoughts were on removing the Erie Lackawanna specifically from South Bend to Chicago. Today that could be used to route less important trains over the NS Chicago line between Chicago and South Bend and especially running those through more rural, southern areas of Lake, Porter and LaPorte counties. Rather than the northern NS route that passes through many cities and towns.
@@joshuaw711 The PRR line between Pittsburgh and St. Louis via Columbus (Ohio), Dayton, and Indianapolis is partially abandoned. It would have been such a good passenger corridor, especially to compete with I-70. Also parallel lines that bypass cities would be really good. Wish they had kept the Pacific Extension and routed freight on that. Freight run by electric locomotives, too. Much of that was electrified before diesels.
@@DiamondKingStudios If the Right of Way still exists, the installation of Tracks is not difficult. The use of innovation in the new tracks is what can make them profitable.
I live near the small village of Valley Falls New York which if you didn’t know had a train derailment a few weeks ago. While nothing was spilled that endangered the community most of the train has just been siting there on the side of the tracks right next to the main intersection after the rubble was cleared off the tracks. This has gotten a lot of people around here wondering why this stuff is happening and given me a lot of leverage to bring up things like nationalization with an a lot more open minded audience despite most people around here being fairly conservative.
I hope this is the beginning of an informative campaign, not just hype. We need a well informed, sustainable plan & execution of a VERY long process with major legal & law changes & big budget expenditures that will have major negative returns on financial statements while it can be transformative for both freight & passenger rail of all types!
The ability to discuss how it became so limited in service to the majority of Citizens, now becomes an issue that should be discussed. Innovation appears to be the key to expanding Rail Services. Europe appears to be doing a good job .....
Virginia apparently wants to electrify some of the rail lines it bought, and sources show VDOT supports it, but CSX won't let them because they claim catenaries dont work well with double stacked cars (SEPTA immediately contradicts this). Make sure to bring that up.
To be fair, the pantographs for catenaries above double stacked cars do look kind of ridiculous being so tall, but aesthetics aren't the biggest concern here.
I'll be really curious to hear how we want to push for this since there are so many options for *how* to nationalize the rails. I'm not a big fan of state DOT's, but I can says ours has been building its rail department out more in recent years... Also to note, it didn't take a lot of public outcry to get our state DOT to formally consider interstate reduction/removal as parts of study proposals. We'll definitely need both federal and state pressure to do something like this. I want to believe.
this is important - we have to do it right. it would be really easy for a program like this to go off the rails (badum tss) and fail, and then conservatives would use it for decades as “proof” that public services suck and can’t work
@@daniel6678 How long will "Conservatives" have some money to conserve? How stable is the US Currency? What is supporting a Fiat Currency? How many G-7 National Economies report thriving GDP figures? US Currency actually seemed to be doomed in 2008. It got worse in 2014. The measure of Class distinction is now defined by Dollars, that are projecting Future Earnings . Seems to exist on images that are described by imaginary Dollars? Like Hollywood ...... how sustainable is that? Who am the Conservatives? Who are the Carnival Barkers? A lot of operators have failed already, we do need something to do while awaiting the next economic decline.....
Would it be better to base nationalization legislation on the Conrail model, or the nationalization of the railroads during WWI, if there was a substantial difference?
We can achieve Nationalization, and we can achieve it today if we work hard enough, and advocate enough! LETS BRING BACK CONRAIL AND LET AMTRAK UNLEASH THEIR TRUE POWER!
"...LET AMTRAK UNLEASH THEIR TRUE POWER" Yes! Let Amtrak say, "NOW I SHOW YOU MY POWER!" ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-DXVom_VYUpQ.html
Do you understand how much the Majority Investors in the two largest Railway conglomerations, East of the Mississippi spent on the Full Page Centerfold in the Wall Street Journal for weeks before they consumed Conrail?
Infrastructure in the 1860s: “all right you folks can build your rail line here’s $50 million dollars go right ahead” Infrastructure now: “we need a highway built can we contract you folks to build it”
The US had Conrail, and we had CN. When i found out CN abandoned the squamish - lilloet portion of the BCRail mainline, that for me was the final push to make me a nationalization extremist. If we ever get our way, i pray those haunting chimes may ring through the Breckendale canyon once again.
Wait, what? No, that can't possibly be. They were VERY clear that we, the people of British Columbia, still owned the railway, we had just sold off the right to USE the railway for 99 years with the option to renew 9 more times. I can't believe that the selloff of BCRail might have had hidden consequences. Shocked, I say.
@@northMOFN I was too young to have feelings about it when the scandal happened, but my dad was so pissed he quit his job and we moved from squamish to maple ridge.
In my country the freight trains have to be bypassed everywhere by passenger trains which have made it difficult to compete with the now 34 meter trucks. So you definitely need to keep both in mind. But in the US maybe there won’t be as many passenger trains and commuter trains so it might be fine for now
What we need is for the big guys to split back into little guys because it all went downhill when everyone got too big. We need railroads to become much more regional again!
That proposal appears to overlook the fact that Leadership decides who suggests what. Leadership positions are purchased not elected. Can You afford to direct the debate? I do not want to sound cynical but how do you suppose we got here? The elimination of the ICC was as infected as the creation of the regulatory body. Congress appears to be corrupted by the same Investors who now are screwing up the remains of the Nations Assets.
I hope you have more than derailments and service failures to corroborate your case - they will happen under nationalized carriers as well. Curious to see the final product.
Not only did RU-vid decide to put chapter markers on a 25 second-long video, but somehow it chose to name the chapters “intro” and… “lettuce”. Great day for fans of both nationalized rail service and leafy greens
I'm in DC now (we met on the BART Platform when you had a meetup in San Francisco), is there going to be any chances to get involved to convince legislators?
For starters we can get our government to buy out trackage. Then the only responsibility of the freight companies would be to provide high quality competitive freight rail service. And we can put an end to monstrously long freight trains on the mainlines.
I'm gonna be honest, I don't see how rail companies being nationalized would magically make things better. It'd be easier for the US to subsidize the rail industry with the money it's currently wasting pumping into other countries.
So when are we getting this campain started? Let's nationalize the freight companies. Push pressure on our legislators to pass the US High Speed Rail Act!
I think that this argument presents somewhat of a false dichotomy. The EU created multinational agreements that separated ownership of and maintenance of the trackways from operating the rolling stock. Since then, some of the countries had declines in railroad quality (UK and Germany come to mind) but more of them have been experiencing huge advances like the Chunnel, and high speed networks in France, Spain, and Italy, that have really revolutionized transport and are starting to zero out airline competition on short flights that are bad for the environment. Here in the US our most successful high speed lines today are running at a profit (Brightline running a private profit, and Acela running a public profit that bankrolls a bunch of other unprofitable service). I think the bigger need is not necessarily some kind of nationalization and more of stripping away the historical monopolies the rail companies never should have received during the 1800s and getting more serious about expansion of both public and private options with neutral and fair criteria that give the public more choices and authentic competition to provide better service. Right now the rail companies are the worst combination of privatized profit and socialized losses. That doesn't create a working market and a working product for the public because all of the economic incentives are distorted.
I have no problem with railroads being privately owned. What I have a problem with is them being purchased, owned, and directed by investment firms that exist solely to squeeze every penny of short term profit out of otherwise legitimate businesses (leaving the business as a dried up dead husk, shouldering the general public with the task of dealing with the ruins of the business after the investment firm kills it), rather than treating the business as a long-term enterprise that acts for the good of it's owners, employees, and customers alike.
not that I'm necessarily against the message of this campaign, but realistically the rail lobby is too entrenched right now for this to have any immediate effect on anything. I'm highly skeptical this will make any big impact nationally, but if i'm wrong i'll be pleasantly surprised.
I take it you don't like Conrail? 🙂 (they still exist BTW, owning some tracks that are shared between CSX and Norfolk Southern). It is very unlikely to see any nationalization of freight again because the freight railroads are too profitable. (aka lobby money)
I love conrail and all but like Government ownership leads to a monopoly meaning nobody else is allowed to compete and can also lead to poor infrastructure on the railroads because “if we’re owned by the government, it doesn’t matter if quality is bad because we literally can’t go out of business”
Stupid rarely fixes stupid, so to the other viewers I suggest watch a couple Thomas Sowell videos, or common sense soapbox, and come to the conclusion that any disabled veteran would know, don't let government run anything!