Michigan's DOT may get Wisconsin's Talgo Trains

[ghettopalmetto]

Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to support intercity rail in Michigan [[or most of the midwest) to support a very tiny fraction of travel is a waste of money. No real harm will come, mind you, except that said money could be used to support much more heavily-used local transit improvements.

You do know that each railcar carries about 96 people--this means an 8-car train foregoes the need for an additional 4-12 flights [[depending on size of plane) in our congested air traffic system? The same 8-car train also takes several hundred vehicles off I-94. That's not insignificant.

And what would you do about people who can't/won't drive or fly? Or people who are travelling to smaller cities, like Kalamazoo? Should they just stay home? Or perhaps you'd like to give them a ride?

Train travel is only "a tiny fraction" because there are only three trains a day between Detroit and Chicago--and those are usually sold out. If you add more trains, that "tiny fraction" will grow, just as it has in the Northeast Corridor, where 1-2 trains an hour carry twice as many people between DC and New York as ALL of the airlines COMBINED.

The cities in the Great Lakes region are spaced comparably to cities in Europe--well within the 350 mile-radius where rail travel is more competitive than air travel. That radius, of course, increases as train speeds increase. If we had a better passenger rail system, we wouldn't have so many sardine-can 50-seat money-losing "regional" jets cluttering the airports.

I'm just curious if you made the same argument when billions of dollars were spent to construct the new terminals at Metro Aiport. After all, people who fly out of DTW are just a "small fraction" of everyone.