DISMANTLING RAILS

My friend, Ronnie, read this blog the other day and sent me an email in response to it. Aside from the fact that it was well-written and really interesting, I'm posting it because he brings up some interesting points I've been planning on addressing (namely, rail travel, and transportation to and from rural and outlying localities). Thought his email made a nice start to a long converation:

"...if there was a bus that I could take conveniently to and from work I would definitely do it, but being in the middle of nowhere I don't have the option really of public transportation, unless I wanted to get up 2 hours early and get home and hour later every night.

I think that besides working on alternative fuel vehicles(which of course only the rich can afford and since they make up so little of the population won't really make that much
of a difference) they should be working on putting back together our public transportation. All those train tracks that lay in deterioration now could be rebuilt and people could hop on trains again for their morning commute rather than clogging the highways. Imagine if there was a train instead of taking the northway? Everyone would be on it. The automotive industry actually worked very hard on dismantling the railways in mid century to make people dependent on cars. There was even an electric car built in the 1920's that was going to change the world and the factory was destroyed by fire (probably Ford setting it to make sure their cars would not be put out of production).

But we still do every bit we can to save the environment at home. I've replaced almost every lamp in the house with compact flourescent bulbs and even started experimenting with LED bulbs, we compost all of our vegetable matter, tea bags, coffee grinds..., we burn the pellet stove to use less oil, we've been sealing and insulating the house. Some of it is to save money for ourselves, but a lot of it is environmental, if everyone just did some of this it would save tons of greenhouse emissions, so since we do so much it probably makes up for four other households who do absolutely nothing."