A new bid to place a measure on the ballot that would ask California voters to approve the state's secession from the U.S. has been cleared for signature gathering.
The “forgetting the money” is one of the parts we city people grumble quite a bit about amongst ourselves whenever the upstate politicos play games with our funding needs.
Look, the goal of govt is supposed to be benefit as many as possible, though for some that seems to also mean ignore the few, which I strongly disagree with.
If we build an HSR system within the city e.g. by replacing metro-north tracks, city people immediately benefit… but then the system can expand from there out to Schenectady, Albany buffalo etc. There’s no reason we can’t build your idea in a sensible, phased manner. We could go backwards too, start in buffalo and build south since the metro-north system is already fully functional.
I no longer live in NYC, but the years working for the MTA showed me a lot of the difficult, non-engineering problems to balance. Maybe there are ways to avoid the human problems associated with any large engineering project, but I don’t yet know if any such shortcuts exist or ever existed.
The tracks are already there: like one slow Amtrak per day. It may be constrained by mountains going up the Hudson, and continuing past Albany, but I would think the Mohawk valley is wide open. If you need to straighten the rails , land is cheap and there aren’t many hills.
The “forgetting the money” is one of the parts we city people grumble quite a bit about amongst ourselves whenever the upstate politicos play games with our funding needs.
Look, the goal of govt is supposed to be benefit as many as possible, though for some that seems to also mean ignore the few, which I strongly disagree with.
If we build an HSR system within the city e.g. by replacing metro-north tracks, city people immediately benefit… but then the system can expand from there out to Schenectady, Albany buffalo etc. There’s no reason we can’t build your idea in a sensible, phased manner. We could go backwards too, start in buffalo and build south since the metro-north system is already fully functional.
I no longer live in NYC, but the years working for the MTA showed me a lot of the difficult, non-engineering problems to balance. Maybe there are ways to avoid the human problems associated with any large engineering project, but I don’t yet know if any such shortcuts exist or ever existed.
The tracks are already there: like one slow Amtrak per day. It may be constrained by mountains going up the Hudson, and continuing past Albany, but I would think the Mohawk valley is wide open. If you need to straighten the rails , land is cheap and there aren’t many hills.