I thought that Donald Trump, being a city boy, was going to make investing in urban infrastructures, including expanding public transportation options part of his game plan. It didn't happen. Of course, I have suspicions that since the majority of urban planners and other urbanists tend to be Marxists, he decided not to play their game. I am disappointed though. Here in the DC area, Amazon is planning on moving one of their headquarters into our area. In addition to bringing in over 25,000 jobs, there are going to be the coat tail business that will be following Amazon into the area. That means we could have an increase in population of over a million more people over the next 10 years or so. You can't have everyone driving, even if they are driving electric cars. Pollution is only part of the equations. Congestion is the other part. Plus, there is the pedestrian danger with more vehicles on the road. There have been a slew of pedestrian fatalities over the past several months, and I don't see it getting any better. When it comes to expanding our public transportation system, there is a lot of desire to make that expansion rail based. An example is the Purple Line, that is currently under construction. That's all well and good, but we have to be realistic. Transportation systems need infrastructure. You can either build a brand new rail infrastructure for billions of dollars, or you can modify what you have for a lot less money We already have a pavement based infrastructure in place, because back in the 1950s it was decided to make our transportation infrastructure based on highways and roads. That was the beginning of the end of most of our long distance passenger rail service, as well as curtailing a lot of the regional and local rail systems. Europe took a different approach. We are not Europe. However, there are some things that Europe does better, and I will discuss that in other posts.
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