Electric cars not accessible 'in next five years'

[Dr Mordrid]

Such lines would by legal necessity be federal government run, or heavily funded & regulated by same.

Fact is that the AMTRAK experience, among other disasters like Fannie/Freddy, have shown that fed-run enterprises are expensive, ineffecient, bureaucratic to the point of paralysis and basically incompetant. Worse still, they are open to corruption and influence peddling - both by unions and suppliers.

Example of the AMTRAK mess: pro-mass transit people put forth the argument that other forms of transit are also subsidized, but a DOT study blew that away; AMTRAK's federal subsidy was pegged at $210.31 per/1000 passenger miles while cars were way down the list at $1.79.

That level of inefficiency is just insane, even after considering low ridership on some routes. This, Boston's "Big Dig," and other examples form the core of resentment over Obamacare being rammed through over public objections, and over other big govt projects.

Auto electrification and other small to medium COTS-like public-private projects work better, but govt is way resistant to giving up that much control when the pork potential is large.

[Brian Ellis]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12138420 is good for a chuckle.

[UtwigMU]

Here railroads are also in poor shape: Majority of tracks were laid down during reign of Franz Josef and they were state of the art for mid 19th century (largest stone arch railway bridge in the World). We now have less tracks than we had 60 years ago. The average speed of a train is 50km/h, the fastest train which uses inclination technique has an average speed of 67km/h. Trains are mostly empty (except for suburb commute trains) and there are fewer passengers year by year and thus fever trains year by year.

I still prefer trains because places I go to are very close to railway stations and some trains have 220V plugs in 2nd class (Once I reinstalled my laptop on a train ride to Vienna).

But as soon as you enter Austria it's totally different: Trains are fast (76km/h instead of 60km/h for Ljubljana - Vienna) and full of passangers of all classes.

Also Austrian and German railroads are profitable while our government needs to dump millions of Euros every year to cover the losses and railroads are inefficient and prone to corruption.

[Dr Mordrid]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12138420 is good for a chuckle.

A great reason why E-REV's like Volt are more practical than pure EV's, though most everyone agrees that the Mini EV is a poor implementation.

Train tracks here are also in bad shape with most in this area being laid down well before I was born, or much earlier out west. As such no high speed trains could use them without the entire route being reconstructed. Hell, just expanding the number of runs could cause maintenance problems.