Trains are For Nerds.

When I was a young fellow, I had a weekly commute from Philadelphia to Monmouth  by way of a particularly painful combination of AmTrak and NJ Transit. I did this because I didn't have a car, and I didn't have a car because I was still figuring out costs and other such things. It's all part of being 21 and out in the wide world for the first time.

On one particular Sunday rehearsal, I wasn't able to get off the NJ Transit train at my stop, because I sat too far back in the train, and the doors weren't opening. So I had to get off at the last stop, and try to figure out how to get to my corporate hotel room from there. This was 1998, before cell phones were attached to everyone's hip, so I had to use a phone card to get in touch with my hotel. I had to wait an hour before the hotel could manage to get a car and driver out to where I was.

Within a few weeks, I'd purchased a crappy old 1986 Lincoln Mark VII. I totalled it within a matter of months and had to buy another car, but whatever. I was never going to endure that agony again.

And that's why I roll my eyes whenever proggies get themselves all worked up over public trains. Trains work only when nothing else is faster or more convenient than they are. Such instances are as follows:

1. The 19th Century
2. New York City
3. When You are a Metric Ton of Coal
4. When You Don't Have a Car

Cars are not without their drawbacks. They carry endless costs, cause not insignificant environmental damage, and kill tens of thousands of people per year in crashes. But the costs of cars are more justly distributed, and the environmental impact not vastly more than that of trains (in terms of deforestation for rails, and burning fuels to power them).

As for the danger: such is the cost of freedom. Car crashes result from individual error, which neither the wisdom of God nor the law of Man will be eradicating anytime soon. The foolish things people do behind the wheel reflect their personal conflicts and errors, but also their aspirations and skills. Automobiles are democracy on wheels.

Public trains are bureaucracy on stilts. Year after year, more and more money sinks into high-speed and light-rail systems that will never ever turn a profit, fomented by the peurile fantasies of romantic proggies who can't stop trying to save people from what they would rather do. Observe:

If you build it for $8 billion, they won't come. L.A. Times' Dan Weikel explains how the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority is actually carrying fewer people now than it did when it began its light rail building project 20 years ago. More than a million people a day ride buses in the county, a little more than 300,000 ride trains, and the figure for trains keeps falling. (I used to keep a close watch on these numbers, and it looks like the trend has been holding for almost ten years now: rail boardings decline a little almost every quarter, regardless of economic activity, gas price, or efforts to promote train ridership.) Transit gadfly Tom Rubin estimates the massive rail project has cost the MTA 1.5 billion potential passengers since 1986. Don't miss the comment section, where trainspotters are still saying the trains will be full once they have one that goes all the way to the ocean.

But goshers, if they could construct a rail from West Hollywood to LAX, I could be at ComicCon in 20% less time!