American Thinker Blog: Why liberals love trains

Why liberals love trains
Thomas Lifson

I enjoyed riding high speed rail the years I lived in Japan. But the Obama administration's ridiculous push to bring a high speed rail network to America is suicidal. Under far more favorable conditions of population density, transit usage, and traffic congestion, only one of the lines in Japan makes money -- the very first line from Tokyo to Osaka. The entire decades-long building binge of a national high speed rail network has been a drag on the Japanese economy, which has performed poorly for 2 decades.

George Will provides the best sumamtion of the real reason Obama and other liberals are fixated on trains:

...the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they-unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted-are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.