Good to know!! Thank you

She 100 percent should take a lesson. It's not as easy as you think to teach someone the basics

You don't have to take lessons at Cochran’s but if you do you might just be lucky enough to get an Olympic gold medalist to teach you.

That was my son's experience when he was learning to ski. Barbara Ann personally showed him the right way to put on his boots and how to use the tow rope and most importantly how to stop! All for the cost of a lift ticket and renting the boots and skis.

Kudos for reading up, but I still disagree that light rail isn't a feasible solution for Vermont despite the small population.

I vehemently disagree that walkable towns and cities aren't a priority. Regardless of population, equality and quality of life dramatically improved when individuals have walkable access to community. Vermont is rural but it is full of small towns that have most of the things one needs in a concentrated area. I live in a small town (around ~4,000 people) but I can walk to the grocery store, restaurants, the post office, the library, etc.

Despite this, car-centric infrastructure detracts from this all the time in ways we have become blind to. Instead of more community or living space we hundreds of free parking spaces smack in the middle of town. We have busy roads that are dangerous to walk or bike on. We have had to install flashing pedestrian crossing signals because people keep getting hit by cars.

These are the subsidies that society pays for cars and car infrastructure.

Public transit, whether it be bus, train, or bike lane are more egalitarian and less impactful than cars.

As you reduce the amount of cars on the road, you also reduce road wear and cost as well.

I'm not saying that every little town can have rail, but the map OP posted is reasonable and doable. 95% of these right of ways already exist . . .

This is not a city-only problem or solution.

If you want to do Boston-Montreal, realistically you're just going to run it out through Springfield and then north on the existing Vermonter/Valley Flyer route, letting you get more value out of planned/intended investments on those corridors for other services, higher/more useful frequencies, and valuable connectivity at the expense of an indirect routing.

The old line wasn't particularly fast when it did exist and while a BOS-SPG-WRJ-MTL routing won't be faster than the historic timetables had for the old line (which were ~2hrs WRJ-Concord, ~4hrs WRJ-Boston on an express making very few stops), it won't be a lot slower either.

Not to be contrarian, but this is a bit of a gross oversimplification, no?

The 49% covered by the taxpayer still benefits the taxpayer as that infrastructure is what supports business, industry, commerce, etc. So it is not a subsidy for drivers, it is a subsidy for transit infrastructure. Which is a subsidy for the effective functioning of society. If we had these rails, we would still need roads for trucks to deliver goods to stores. The fewer drivers on the road, the higher percentage would be paid for by the general taxpayer. (Plus just as a higher order argument, people without children pay for schools. But like that is the point of taxes, to provide for the common good, is it not? We are supposedly a democracy, not an anarcho-capitalist state. It is not 'unfair' to pay for something you don't use through taxes. That is the social contract we have agreed upon, we all adhere to it, that is the definition of equitable. ie fair.)

I'll admit that cars produce more pollution on average than rail per capita of utilization. But the rest of that article is not necessarily translatable as it is based on data from Germany, which has different laws and subsidies, as well as population density. One noted point was designated free parking as a driving subsidy. That is a bit of a stretch, especially in a rural area where land is relatively cheap. And looking at the research itself, I question it a little, though I am not about to do a deep dive into its rigors. But even on the pollution front, EV cars are becoming more prominent, which helps (though electricity is still predominantly produced by burning fossil fuels so not remotely carbon neutral).

Gas subsidies aren't an argument in this context as trains benefit from that as well.. they run on diesel. Almost no major rail systems outside of intercity tram systems in the US run purely electric as the maintenance costs are far in excess of that of maintaining a diesel locomotive.

So to say cars thru gas is subsidized by $16B and rail only at $1.4B is misleading at best. Rail is subsidized thru both programs due to the nature of Diesel engines in the US.

And the whole grouping of last points that it improves traffic, walkable cities, yadda yadda. If this was an urban or suburban state/ region I would agree with you. But it is VT, the second least populous state in the union. We don't need to worry about walkable cities, because, frankly, VT doesn't have any real cities. Burlington is smaller than some MA towns. And it is very walkable. Probably the most walkable city I have been to. Traffic in VT is nearly nonexistent relative to other regions. And while if this rail system existed it would be great, we would still need cars, or at least buses because everything is so spread out here. Where I live it would be an hour bike ride to get to any transit hub. Which to me is a much more costly waste of resources (my time) than 10k per year for my car by that article's estimate. Plus it is simply not feasible with children and families. At least not without a significant reduction in QoL.

These arguments are great for dense urban areas with dense suburban areas in between. Like in Europe, and US megalopolises like the northeast corridor (Boston to DC). For rail systems like this to have an impact on cars, you need layers of transit (buses, then trams, then trains). Layers that would far exceed in cost and personnel the benefit it provides to a population when there aren't enough people.

Granularity matters with science and engineering, and VT is not going to be impacted by transit systems in the same ways that urban areas are.

Second Ziggys. It's big and loud enough (but not too loud) that an infant won't make a dent.

Exactly. Because "inefficiency" in any device is just energy that got converted to heat, which is what you want anyways in this case. I don't worry much about leaving my indoor lights on in winter for much the same reason, though some of that energy does escape out the window as light.

Don’t tease me :(

I’d take train noise over F35s myself.

Aside from being black, what are the characteristics of an assault knife?

Besides the other drawbacks that have already been mentioned, most notably the phenomenal cost, once you arrive at your destination, there's no usable public transportation anywhere except in Burlington and Montpelier. How are people who live more than a mile or two from the train stations in Lyndonville, Newport, Hillsboro and all the other dots on your map going to get from their houses to the train and back, especially with everything they bought in their shopping trip to Burlington? There's no buses, Uber or Lyft where I live. There is an unreliable local taxi company, which is an old geezer and his minivan, but I can drive all the way to Burlington for way less than the taxi fare between my house and the nearest train station on your map. Sorry, but if this extensive of a passenger train network to serve a state with this low of a population density was a good idea, someone would already be making a profit doing it.

"High-density" in the context of VT, haha. Agreed on all counts.

This guy knows his za!

Yeah, the problem here is that Vermont is obviously a rural state with no real cities. As a consequence almost everybody who has somewhere to go already has a car. Those folks who are already necessarily paying for a car along with all the associated costs aren’t going to want to pay for railways they aren’t going to use. Especially when those cost would be coming out of funds that go to the relevant departments/agencies that already can’t maintain the roadways to serviceable standards.

I think "high-density" is a bridge too far for VT, but larger areas of "medium-density" is perfectly realistic and arguably the only real solution to VT's housing crisis. The local downtown is not going to be harmed by a couple more blocks of 3-6 story buildings....like the ones that are already in the part of the downtown area as it is.

They're also the only places in VT that typically have the utilities in place to really support significant amounts of housing.

And yes - having more people living in town centers also makes transit as normal transportation choice more viable. "Last-mile" is a big issue otherwise.

It's a hike but the walk between south and north Station is my welcome to Boston tour. Yes drinks are involved hence taking the train . 😉

I’d be interested in the cost savings from not needing to heat the home much or at all versus money spent on that much insulation. Sure it’s probably better for an environmental standpoint but might not be a good financial move. The article says about 10% so what, an extra $30-$40,000 on a house that size? Your paying maybe 5-7% that to heat a normal house annually. That money would make you a lot more money over the years in a mutual fund so the selling point is really that it’s more environmentally friendly I guess.

I mean, it is a nice idea, but let's be real VT fails to keep its roads in good condition, and when it comes to development nothing of consequence ever happens or at least never completes in a reasonable amount of time. Not high enough investment in the future, too much pushback from those who just want to maintain the VT they know.

And this? This would be billions in development costs, require thousands of rights of way agreements from as many people, and require the cooperation of dozens if not 100+ town governments. The largest city in the state can't even incentivize the completion of a commercial development project on prime real estate downtown after the demolition was already completed in... going on 6 years? A municipal project of this scale would never fly, VT is beautiful and I love so much about it, but it is a bit stagnant development-wise.

I would love this. I live in NH not far from WRJ, I would 1000% take a train to boston far more often than I drive. Bonus points if it goes right to south station. Trips to fenway, Microcenter, dinner, etc would be far more doable if we could ride down, do our shopping, catch a ball game, and then ride home without having to drive.

I'll never forget taking lovers lane to bypass the construction

I know the exact spot you're talking about, I had no idea they were actually trying to get one put in that's awesome

Rail subsidies

>Many countries offer subsidies to their railways because of the social and economic benefits that it brings. The economic benefits can greatly assist in funding the rail network. Those countries usually also fund or subsidize road construction, and therefore effectively also subsidize road transport. Rail subsidies vary in both size and how they are distributed, with some countries funding the infrastructure and others funding trains and their operators, while others have a mixture of both.

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Great question!

Drivers cover around 51% of road maintenance and construction.

The other 49% is paid for by the general tax payer (many of which don't drive by the way).

Road maintenance and construction costed $416 billion in 2014 alone.

This doesn't account for the massive externality of the pollution cars create, traffic deaths, inflation of construction and housing costs, etc. A recent study showed that the lifetime cost of owning a small car is ~690,000 and society subsidizes $275,000 of that cost.

Keep in mind that these are conservative estimates of the subsidies society provides to cars.

Gas subsidies alone account for $16 billion a year from U.S. taxpayers.

Meanwhile in the U.S., passenger rail is subsidized at $1.4 billion a year.

So yeah... cars get massive subsidies compared to rail... and rail is way better for reducing traffic, pollution, deaths, and increasing quality of life, health, and walkable cities and towns.

Seems like we could make the switch.... we already have the transportation funding... the auto industry just has our representatives (and apparently much of the populace) completely brainwashed.