Antiplanner takes on President Obama’s statement that “(i)n the midst of civil war, we laid railroad tracks from one coast to another that spurred commerce and industry.” Guess what:
Aside from the simple factual issue that most of the first transcontinental railroad was constructed after, not during, the war, most of Obama’s audience would have forgotten that its construction caused one of the first and biggest financial swindles of the nineteenth century. That scandal was the result of a simple fact: such a railroad made no economic sense in the late 1860s.
The bottom line is “while transcontinental railroads eventually did make economic sense, high-speed rail never will.”
Same old stuff.
Update: As much as liberals love light rail, they sure as hell didn’t spread the luv to Lynx man Pat McCrory in the governor’s race.
