it's the buzzword salad it never fails it makes me wanna wag my tail when it comes i wanna wail

Obā-san

UPS MAIL INNOVATIONS!!!

Salix Babylonika

ace Blue's Clues reference.

Calica

innovation: actually just means handing it to the usps

glennmagusharvey

Calica said:

innovation: actually just means handing it to the usps

TAKE THAT UPS

Honestly I don't get why people hate on the U.S. postal service so much.

From my experience it gets things where I want them to be in a timely manner.

Bee

I wasn't aware there was much hatred for the postal service, other than austerity-happy congressmen.

Imipolex G

going postal

lee4hmz

Speaking of austerity, I'm still not sure why Congress hates Amtrak so much. I guess racism, general dislike of the Northeast by Southerners and the Mountain West, and possibly airline industry meddling all play a part.

Bee

Amtrak legitimately sucks.  My sister would take it all the time going back and forth from college in Washington, and my grandmother takes it when she comes down.  I have never once seen them run anywhere near on time, even before the austerity spree.  Every single time, they're at least a full hour late, and up to 5-6.

It got to the point where they stretched out the schedule to try and account for the endless delays, and they're still late to those.

Like, the Postal Service does their fucking job, even if 95% of it is schlepping spam (which isn't exactly their fault).  Amtrak is just a train wreck shaped like a running train.  I imagine Congress hates Amtrak because they've had to ride faff about in the depot waiting for it.

lee4hmz

Even so, it seems like they have a strong desire to throw the baby out with the bathwater (closing it entirely, or insisting that someone like First or the Northeastern commuter rail networks take over the NEC and trash the long-distance routes) instead of fixing its problems.

lee4hmz

(Another thing is that the freight rail companies own most of the track Amtrak uses outside the DC-NY run, and in general they are not happy about it; though they'll make concessions for short runs like VRE or MARC, Amtrak typically just gets in the way.)

Bee

That's the main problem, yeah.  But it's like, you made a state-funded train system that runs on freight rails owned by private companies with literally every incentive to give you the finger, and little incentive to build more or properly maintain them.  What the hell did you expect to happen?

Princess Alice

Nationalize it all. #unpopularopinion

lee4hmz

Or build new rights-of-way for high-speed rail, which everyone seems to balk at the cost of. "Why should be do this when we already have Interstates and airports" seems to be the rhetoric, but 1) air travel is a joke these days 2) eventually we'll have to come up with a more efficient alternative because flying uses a lot of fuel, with no real way to use regeneration or hybrid methods.

Bee

Yeah, I mean, I want a good publicly-funded high-speed rail.  I just want a good publicly-funded high-speed rail that doesn't cut really bad corners like Amtrak did.

I also understand that the US presents a pretty unique problem that Europe and its awesome trains don't have -- we're really, really spread out with very sparse population distributions.  Any rail system will cost several times as much and be several times more difficult to maintain.  But if you're going to do it, you can't afford to half-ass it like that.

Obā-san

you know what really bugs me

it seems like a lot of the time when it comes to publicly-funded programs, what happens is that the people who don't actually like the program decide to make it so that if the program happens corners are cut in the most deliberately detrimental way possible

so their petulance results in a worst of both worlds situation where the public gets the least good thing possible for the money

Bee

Well yeah, that's basically the crux of today's Republican Party.  Regulation and public services hurt the pockets of their donors, so they fuck those things over to be as hilariously inefficient as possible until the public starts to think they're fundamentally awful ideas in the abstract instead of just ones that got fucked over for private interest.

Sredni Vashtar

It does seem that the most self-righteous "fiscal conservatives" are the most likely to horribly squander the monies that they are entrusted with, at least in this political climate.

Obā-san

yeah

i just felt the need to state that in the broadest terms possible for some reason

Princess Alice

I remember being taken aback when I realized railroads are privately owned.

Like, I got that the trains are operated by private shipping companies, but that the tracks themselves are under private ownership just seems all kind of wrong to me.

Why would anyone want such an integral chunk of their country's transportation infrastructure to be controlled by private interests? It'd be like privatizing highways or water systems; it just doesn't make sense.

Calica

i once got twitter ads promoting the idea of private water

Klinotaxis

rather than privatized, the railroads were built by private companies in the first place. they even got bonus land from the government to encourage them to do so.

uh, in the US, anyway.

Bee

Yep.  Abe Lincoln himself signed off on the legislation that let Union Pacific build our transcontinental rail -- as a measure for the Civil War (you can imagine what the Union's own budget looked like at the time).  Even today it's the largest in the country, and the only one that comes close is a relatively recent mass merger of just about all its competitors.

Princess Alice

Klinotaxis said:

rather than privatized, the railroads were built by private companies in the first place. they even got bonus land from the government to encourage them to do so.

uh, in the US, anyway.

I mean, I know that, but I would have hoped at some point the government would step in and say "we're running the show now"

That's what I would have done, at least

Of course I would have also nationalized the Bell System instead of breaking it up so clearly my thoughts on these things do not align with most of America's

Salix Babylonika

CentralAvenue said:

Klinotaxis said:

rather than privatized, the railroads were built by private companies in the first place. they even got bonus land from the government to encourage them to do so.

uh, in the US, anyway.

I mean, I know that, but I would have hoped at some point the government would step in and say "we're running the show now"

That's what I would have done, at least

Of course I would have also nationalized the Bell System instead of breaking it up so clearly my thoughts on these things do not align with most of America's

the thing is that that's not legal.

Like I get where you're coming from and I would like decent, affordable mass transit too (hell I'd be OK with bus lines though they're hardly ideal), but they, like, can't do that.

Klinotaxis

actually the entire rail system was nationalized during WWI. apparently. constitutionally you could maybe sell it under the commerce clause.

lee4hmz

Also, a big chunk of the Northeast's freight rail was nationalised under Conrail in the 1970s, because Penn Central and Erie Lackawanna in particular had been failing for years due to bad management (and in PC's case, an ill-advised merger of the Pennsy and the NYC).