Originally Posted by
kebosabi
But seriously, our nation's addiction to oil needs to be solved. One idea that the government has failed to invest were high-speed rail linking outlying cities as they do in Europe and Asia. Frankly, these should've been done years ago, but only now are we realizing that our car culture has its shortfalls. But as the days of $200 barrel oil approaches, such an idea is not as farfetched as many people believe - except for lobbyists and NIMBYs who block such proposals.
Several years ago, the federal gov't (probably Transportation) offered Missouri a wonderful deal: they would pay almost all of the cost (MO would have picked up a tiny fraction of the cost and most of this could have been picked up with "in kind") to build a model high-speed rail system between St. Louis and Kansas City, with one brief stop midway in Columbia, as a demonstration project and subsidize running it for a while. (Apparently, we had the perfect spot available down the middle of I-70.) Our *illustrious* governor at the time (John Ashcroft) and the Missouri Dept. of Transportation turned it down without even giving it serious thought. Many of us here have lamented this lame-brained decision repeatedly. Never, though, more than now.