re: One thing I love about Trump and why i'm voting for him in 2024

Don’t understand how anyone even remotely considering voting Republican can look at Desantis, then to Trump, then back to Desantis and think Trump is what is in our best interest in 2024.

Desantis would be the best Republican candidate for President in 40 years.

Jeep Wrangler. I drive quite a bit. I used to live in Germany with public transportation and a Jeep, for 5 years. So I know what the frick I am talking about. I now live in NWA. Public transportation done right would be a blessing. So how about you stfu bitch

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Public transit means development, JOBS and a bustling community.

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It also means an increased tax burden, but that's not the big problem. The big problem is you need a large population to support it and requisite population density.

Here is a list of all the commuter rails in the US. Here is a list of all commuter rail operators in North America.

On both lists, the lowest average riders per day is the Music City Star in Nashville, TN and it clocks in at 800-1,100 riders per day. So let's say this represents the bare minimum ridership needed for such an organization to exist.

Nashville is the 23rd most populous city in the US with a population of 682,262 spread out over 475.54 square miles for a population of ~1,435 people per square mile.

Baton Rouge is the 111th most populous city in the US with a population of 214,374 people spread out over 86.45 square miles, giving us a population density of ~2,480 people per square mile.

Numbers are from here.

With a population density of just over 1,000 people per square mile more than Nashville, that should make us a shoe-in, right?

Wrong. What we have in density, we lack in total population and that's an important piece of the puzzle. We can see how important that is by looking at public bus numbers since both areas have these.

Nashville daily riders: approimately 30,000 riders per day with 44 routes, so ~682 people per route per day.

Baton Rouge daily riders: ~ 6,626 pre-COVID and ~ 3,142 post-COVID (those are December 2019 and December 2021 numbers, respectively). CATS ran 24 routes in December 2019 for ~276 passengers per route per day. In December 2021 it was 22 routes for ~142 passengers per route per day.

So even at pre-COVID numbers the Nashville MTA sees ~2.5x passengers per route per day than does BR's CATS. Looking at that in just raw numbers is even worse, with the Nashville MTA servicing ~5x more bus passengers per day than BR's CATS.

There's no reason to think use of a commuter rail service would be any different. Remember that 800-1,100 number of commuter train riders per day in Nasville? All things being equal, that would likely equate to something like 160-220 per day for Baton Rouge and that's hardly worth the cost.

Speaking of cost, to go back to our bus example (and the tax burden comment), CATS doesn't make enough from its riders to cover just the salaries of the bus drivers (much less maintenance, fuel, salaries for the other employees, benefits, etc). The vast majority of their funding comes from a tax on people who largely aren't served by the system and largely don't use it. Building and maintaining a rail line (or even just the cars to use on only the existing two or three lines) would be far more expensive than CATS, thus becoming an extra burden on taxpayers. The CATS tax was just one more thing to push people into leaving Baton Rouge, add a larger additional tax for commuter rail? Say goodbye to more of your tax base.

I’m just fooling about. Now me personally, I don’t downvote that much because I’m high and mighty and get in there with a comment instead. Naw mostly because I’m too lazy to assess.

Taxes will be collected by the trillions roughly 3-4 trillions every year just counting federal.

Your damn right about public transport being one way that tax money should be spent on the tax payers...trains, local community shuttles for the non densely populated areas where the people are a bit more spread.

But the problem is government doesn't do anything correctly and corrupts absolutely everything. In principle, your right but in reality...ONLY someone like TRUMP would do it right.

You should see how long it’s taken to just get the blueprints for a maglev from Houston to Dallas. It’s insane how long politicians take to do anything

Sorry, I shouldn’t have been so hostile. I assume with deplorable in your username you are probably a pretty cool dude.

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Give me one good reason why we can't have bullet trains.

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Federal government should not be in the transportation business. It's simply not their role and will cost 10,000x more than if it was done privately.

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One thing I love about Trump

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Is socialism? Fun times. Useful idiot has served his purpose.