I sometimes wonder why anyone chooses to remain enslaved to commuting in a motor vehicle and why are we not investing American dollars back into our American railroads, big time?
Suburban sprawl, highways and environmental events increasingly affect our lives through tornadoes, increased rainfall and the ensuing flash flooding, heat islands and domes, loss of important farmlands, woodlands and natural habitats, urbanization of once suburban and rural places, loss of animal and plant species, building of warehouses away from our cities and ports, pollution and depletion of our natural drinking water supplies, aquifers, rivers and streams, inability to grow our own food locally, increased commuting times on our deteriorating highways, roads and bridges, loss of productivity and time away from family and friends, exposure to road-rage incidents, vehicular accidents and impaired drivers, which can lead to injury or death.
Toll booths and speed radar are both controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) wherein the AI will even mail you a ticket to your home and cause loss of human working hours. A host of other issues for our region are brought on by poor and misguided land-use planning; unthoughtful zoning; absolute zero zoning for solely agricultural lands, woodlands and waterways
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was signed into law on Nov. 15, proposes to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations when it should propose to restore and conserve or build 500,000 train stations across our nation.
There was a time, not that long ago, wherein all one had to do was walk, bike, trolley or take a short commute to the nearest train station. The trains of the former Reading Railroad could take you almost any place you needed to go within Southeastern Pennsylvania or offer you connections to other train networks, at regional stations, some offering routes beyond our state’s borders.
The former Reading Railroad tracks are now used by entities such as SEPTA and Conrail while others were abandoned. Some of the rail line has been converted into pedestrian and bike trails through the Rails-to-Trails program as seen in parts of Hatfield Township, Montgomery County and Richland Township, Bucks County; however, the highest and best use of the old railroad easements and tracks would be an actual railroad line for railcars or a monorail system, not trails.
More important, the railroad easements, are all public record, running with the land, in perpetuity, waiting for the railroads to be brought back to life or reimaged in the form of a new monorail passenger and freight system.
Dependance on motor vehicles, no matter how they are powered, can only offer us increased suburban sprawl and dependence on warehouses which are being built farther and farther away from our nation’s ports and cities, which in turn make us even more dependent on the auto makers and tractor-trailers and all the apparatus tied to them, except trains are the missing link with the newer warehouses, which is by design.
Schemed and crafted by our auto, oil, finance, insurance and technology industries, they’ve managed to keep trains out of our collective, public conscience. They’ve removed trolleys powered by electricity in our cities and given us buses on tires that require oil and gas to power them; they removed trains powered by electricity and given us each expensive motor vehicles on tires that require oil and gas, among other things.
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