Greater Greater Washington

Two-track subways have inherent maintenance problems. New York is mostly four-track, so sections of track can be shut down for total replacement. They also have a huge number of track switches and interlockings, and can reroute onto alternate tracks easily. NYC can also run trains 24/7. Two-track systems can't do that. One of the legacies of the Tammany Hall regime is that the infrastructure from about 1900 was way overbuilt. But the real reason NYC is four-track is that the subways replaced elevated lines that were at capacity with two tracks.

Few other subways are four-track. The Broad Street Line in Philadelphia is four-track, but is underutilized. A few sections of the Chicago MTA are four track. The London Underground has the two-track problem. (Worse, that system is older and has undersized tunnels. They have to build special maintenance machines that will fit in their tunnels.)

In the US, there are probably two systems that could justify four-track - SF's BART and Washington's Metro.[1] But it took both a long time for each to build the traffic to justify it. BART has a lot of elevated sections, and four-track elevated lines roof over an entire street. (NYC used to have some; getting rid of them was one of the reasons the subway system was built.)

In practice, two-track systems do heavy maintenance during weekends and holidays. This takes careful planning, special equipment, and lots of competent, hard-working people. But it's done routinely by the big…

There's been fairly interesting data piling up about mandatory helmet laws.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/29/business/a-bicycling-mystery-head-injuries-piling-up.html

> The number of head injuries has increased 10 percent since 1991, even as bicycle helmet use has risen sharply, according to figures compiled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. But given that ridership has declined over the same period, the rate of head injuries per active cyclist has increased 51 percent just as bicycle helmets have become widespread.

...

> Many specialists in risk analysis argue that something else is in play. They believe that the increased use of bike helmets may have had an unintended consequence: riders may feel an inflated sense of security and take more risks.

Cars are more reckless around bicyclists and drive closer to them when they see they are wearing a helmet:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10bike.html

We also see here that bicycles are the lowest risk of head injury while traveling streets and sidewalks:

http://www.howiechong.com/journal/2014/2/bike-helmets

Turns out you're much more likely to suffer a head injury in a car, or walking than on a bicycle. Should helmets be mandated for driving and walking? Evidence suggests it would make more sense for those activities.

Wearing helmets increases the likelihood of neck injuries: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457500000488

Feds had to stop claiming bike helmets prevent 85% of…

Resisting Arrest, or Assaulting a Police Officer. In many cities, (I believe DC, for example, is promenantly know for this), many people are charge solely with assaulting an officer. One would be led to believe that there are thousands of wreckless citezens wantonly assaulting the police, if one did not realize that this was a euphemism for declining to censent to be searched, or "getting lippy".

EDIT: Why the downvote? Can't handle the truth? Here's some evidence that, at least in DC, the law is used to effectively arrest people for resiting arrest, with no other charge:

"Nearly two-thirds of those arrested [in the District of Columbia] for assaulting an officer weren’t charged with any other crime, raising questions about whether police had legal justification to stop the person."[1]

"In Coghill v. United States, 982 A.2d 802 (D.C. 2009), the court upheld a conviction for misdemeanor APO. Mr. Coghill was stopped by police while driving a car, and refused to let police search his car. He then got out of the car at their instruction, but at some point got back in the car. Officers tried to drag him out of the car, but he braced himself against the floorboards and gripped the steering wheel."[2]

"On Tuesday, Ward 3 DC Councilmember Mary Cheh introduced a bill to reform some elements of criminal justice procedure. It would change the law around "assaulting a police officer," strengthen prosecutors' duty to turn over evidence to defendants" [3]

[1]…

Cars and trucks are relegated to the 2d grid of streets. They consume an inordinate amount of space, and require that all travel occur in series down a road. When an accident occurs, this disrupts the flow of traffic down that path, and also frequently disrupts the flow of surrounding roads as drivers seek alternate routes around the problem. Roads wear down over time, and require maintenance to repair. Salt and chemicals placed on roads to melt ice and snow can have adverse impacts on the local water tables and have other negative ecological impacts.

Air-travel doesn't have those same constraints. Travel could be more point-to-point. An accident by one or two aircraft doesn't need to inhibit the travel of all other crafts flying in the general vicinity. Air space, while regulated and crowded in some urban areas, is largely under-utilized and expansive. It's also not a space that is shared with foot traffic, so pedestrians could reclaim some of the space currently allocated to roads since the volume of vehicular traffic would likely drop.

That's not to say that personal air travel doesn't introduce an entire set of new problems and challenges - it absolutely does, but there are many problems that cars and roads cause which air-travel avoids by-design.

Think of air-travel in the context of this cartoon:

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/24948/to-a-pedestrian-a-roads-a-tiny-space-with-danger-just-beside/

It doesn't really matter that much, if your city wasn't destroyed during the war, it was destroyed during the 70's or 80's (in a process continuing to this day) when the communists governments decided to ruin every larger town in a same manner as the Americans did 20 years before them, massive tear-downs, urban freeways (right through the city center, see Prague), uniform large scale housing projects on the periphery. Admittedly, the scale was not that large, but it was the same kind of destruction.

Krakow's greater center is just gorgeous, I really loved it. But it was a similar experience, to a certain degree, as well. On a train from Katowice, the first sight was something called "Krakow Business Park", disgusting office park, a place that doesn't belong anywhere, I work in a similar project and it is almost the same. Glass blocks surrounded by an endless parking lot. Then some recent suburban development, complete clusterfuck under all circumstances. And looking from Kazimierz across Wisla, what I saw on the other bank was also very disappointing. Or this https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-dO_Cw7ayCQk/Tx2LuPNmF0I/AAAAAAAABzY/8wP9bDXYeU0/s819/IMG_4406_v1.JPG, seen right from the castle Wawel. And this was not built by the soviet engineers. Not much has changed after 1989. Maybe nothing at all.

This sums it all. You don't need a war. http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/4967/houstons-cars-vs-rotterdams-bombs/

First, you're making an argument I didn't make. I didn't say, "the GOP thinks Amtrak is bad because it is subsidized more than roads" (though clearly some do think that, like the Cato libertarians). I said "the GOP thinks Amtrak is bad because it operates on the brink of insolvency mitigated by direct cash subsidies".

Secondly, go read the actual source cited by that Economist blog post. It's another blog post:

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/12208/funding-amtrak-is-more-cost-effective-than-subsidizing-roads/

The cost breakdown in this blog post is ad hoc, and the biggest "wins" for Amtrak come from parking and "resource consumption".

Parking is taxed, not directly subsidized. The blog post dips into studies that (rightly) excoriate free parking, and scales the external cost of free parking across all parking, thus conflating the total cost of driving with the subsidized cost of driving.

For "resource consumption", the blogger found a study that attributed the entire cost of our military presence in the gulf to oil prices, simply averaging the military budget across oil prices per barrel.

This just isn't credible.

I am not anti-Amtrak, but I am anti-oversimplified-arguments and anti-demonizing-viewpoints. A counterpoint from Cato, which I also do not buy outright:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/bp/bp107.pdf