State and Local Government / Transportation

This Is Spending On Rail That I Can Support

By David Stokes on Dec 10, 2009

The Kansas City Star is reporting on the opening of a new sidetrack along Missouri’s Amtrak route connecting St. Louis and Kansas City. This expenditure of $8 million will have immediate, quantifiable benefits for transportation in Missouri. It isn’t some pipe dream of spending enormous sums of money in the hope that a small number of people will ride more rail or transit. Rather, it is an engineering-based improvement that will begin improving our rail service right away. I cited this as an example of well-directed resources in my testimony two month ago before the Joint Transportation Oversight Commission.

Needless to day, this improvement is a far better use of tax money than some dream of high-speed rail that will get someone from Kansas City to Chicago in 7 hours at best, when they can fly there for the same price in 1 hour and 20 minutes.

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David Stokes

Director of Municipal Policy

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