OPINION:
I love streetcars and trains. In fact I will put up with moving across the country at an average speed of 35 miles an hour to get the train experience. This is what happens when you run a passenger train on freight lines; you don’t move any faster than the freight. I rode the cable cars in San Francisco, where any local has to fight the tourists if they want to ride.
Passenger rail transit is for the most part about nostalgia for an earlier time (“No desire for a streetcar,” Web, March 4). In nearly all cases it is not about transportation, which is a commodity. The political left invariably pushes for rail because it fits their lust for centralized control, to create a utopia where individuals and their rights vanish.
Unfortunately, what you need in order to maintain nostalgia is wealth, and what you need to create wealth is efficient, cheap transportation. What the left never seems to realize is that their actions choke off any chance that they will get back to that time when you boarded the streetcar on St. Charles Street to ride to your job two miles away on Canal Street. Destroy the wealth, which the left is so successful in doing, and about the only place you are going to be riding a streetcar in the future is in Disney World.
You might also note that the era when streetcars were prevalent nearly everywhere was marked by unfettered capitalism, and brutal conditions for the workers creating the wealth flowing from the genius of Edison, Tesla, Morgan, Rockefeller, Westinghouse, Vanderbilt, Ford, etc. Realizing the left’s utopia eventually ends with you riding a donkey, not a streetcar.
SAMUEL BURKEEN
Reston
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