I45owl Wrote:I wouldn't have posted it if I didn't have a somewhat credible source for it.

I think I made it pretty clear that my best guess is that it's an economic thing. We only have about 10 years supply of oil at any one time, because it's simply not economically feasible to develop supplies any faster than that. I suspect there's a lot of the same thing here, with nuke weapons being dismantled and nuke power plants not being built (except in France) uranium prospects simply weren't being developed. I'd say there's a very strong likelihood that if the demand's there, the ore will be found.

As for transit, the reason nobody rides mass transit in America is because our mass transit is horrible. Give us a system as good as Tokyo's in every major city, and a national rail system equal to Japan's Shinkansen network, and you'd see Americans on trains. And you can move a bunch of people from New York to Chicago using a lot less fuel by train than you can by car, even Prius. The inner city mass transit will experience low ridership initially because the cities aren't laid out to work well with mass transit. Once good systems are in place, urban development will rearrange itself to be more compatible. Some real estate speculators will make money off that. So what?

But even as spread out as Houston is, you could come up with some things that would work a whole lot better than one rail line that doesn't go anywhere that anybody goes. I've never ridden it, because I've never needed to go from one place on the line to another place on the line. I know Rice students use it a fair amount, as it's a convenient way to get from the campus either downtown or to Reliant, but that's just not in my commuting pattern any more.

If there was a rail line from Conroe/The Woodlands via IAH downtown and south via HOU to Pearland/Alvin/Angleton, a line from Katy through downtown (they should have kept the old rail line along I-10) and out to Baytown, a line from Sugar Land/Richmond/Rosenberg downtown and out to Kingwood, and a line from Galveston through LaMarque, Texas City, NASA, and the ship channel through downtown and out to Jersey Village and the 290 area, with circular connectors in the area of 610, the beltway, and 1960/Highway 6, and some feeder lines to significant places not hit by the main lines, I think you'd see ridership build up pretty well over time. I could see lots of people choosing to live in Galveston and commute downtown if that were available. The feds are the only entity with the ability to raise that kind of money.