When considering commuter rail in New Hampshire, here’s a thought experiment that offers a great place to start. Should the Massachusetts Bay Colony have built commuter rail in Revolutionary-era Boston?
I’ve been badmouthing proposed commuter rail projects for New Hampshire for fifteen years. There’s no benefit. It will never make money, meaning it will cost all of us (equity) to have something few will use. But they keep trying.
There’s a bill working its way through the New Hampshire legislature that prohibits funding commuter rail in any form with taxes on GraniteState residents. Pass or fail, there’s another Boogey-they-them thing (see, I didn’t say man) that might derail it. Something they insisted on for months.
Commuter rail is another piece of the ‘urbanization’ puzzle that originated with the United Nations’ global goals, a.k.a. Agenda 21 (now called Agenda 2030) to get us out of our cars, in an effort to reduce ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change.’
The Legislature has a bill to waste tax dollars on yet another capitol corridor rail study. A petition has been created to send the message that any commuter rail project in New Hampshire will cost every taxpayer millions in perpetuity to serve an insignificant sliver of the population.
Public transportation is an expression of the state’s right to define how you get from A to B. Not just how but when and where. The modern commuter rail fantasy fits this profile. It is a long-standing dream of the Left. To throw your money down a hole for government controlled ride-sharing. Whether you can use it, want … Read more
I guess there are bigger priorities in Nashua than “Choo Choo.” Capital equipment. Playgrounds. Sidewalks. A few ‘plants’ to spiffy up the joint. Work on a community center. Repurposing technology and updating an online dashboard so residents can access information from about city projects and initiatives. Like choo choo? Nashua has four million dollars (leftover) and not a penny … Read more
Regional Planning Commissions are unaccountable bodies of busy-bodies who operate outside the usual rules for political interference in your day to day life. They get access to and spend public money, and can serve as a pipeline for Federal political class priorities. They are also notoriously progressive, so when the Nashua Regional Planning Commission sets up … Read more
Today, in a letter to the editor of New Hampshire Business Review, Peter J. Griffin, the NH Railroad Revitalization Association President, considers what at first appears to be a rhetorical question. “How will tourists get to New Hampshire?” How is this a problem? Mr. Griffin bemoans the loss of days past when public transportation (trains) … Read more
I don’t typically link to the Concord Fish Wrapper, but this is worth the trip. I am a retired highway engineer and transportation planner with more than 36 years of experience in eight states and Washington, D.C. My opinions are based on experience, 42 years of transportation policy observations and objective study of publicly available … Read more
Any good liberal will tell you this. Never talk about how much something costs or who will have to pay for it until you have convinced them it will be good for them.
The White House announced earlier this month multi-billion dollar spending on a high-speed rail system for the nation. But President Joe Biden has already participated in a project with this exact promise – without delivering results. Indeed, some of the Barack Obama-Biden rail projects have been abandoned; most have run over projected costs.
In 2017, Nashua eagerly embraced an opportunity to build a rail stop for the newly formed Boston Surface Railroad. It was a planned for-profit passenger rail service with a dirty public money secret we exposed back in 2017.
One of the biggest issues with commuter rail is that everyone in the state, most of whom will never use or have use of it, will have to pay for it forever. So, y’all should be excited about this bill.
Commuter Rail should not be a priority in New Hampshire for more reasons than I can count, but I’ve counted them for the past 12 years, with some success. Now, it looks like Amtrak has imagined a spur from Masskachusetts to Concord. Why? Seriously, why?
Written as a deliberate violation of the State Constitution SB241 wants to break the law to fund transportation infrastructure we don’t need that will forever suck resources from more pressing priorities. Those would be any other priority you can imagine.
The New Hampshire commuter rail boondoggle (or just ‘rail’) has a long history on these pages. There is very little about it we have not explored. Traffic fits that profile. Before you can ride a train, you need to get to it. That’s a problem for Nashua but they are forging ahead anyway. Start with a 5.2 Million … Read more
Commuter rail for New Hampshire is probably one the stupidest ideas on which the left will not give up. There is no sensible application but one. Help New Hampshire residents leave the Granite State to work in Massachusettes. It has no practical application for us. Most of the state lives nowhere near it. Will never … Read more
The subheading to the Union Leader article reads “In 2017, the city took steps to explore bringing privately-funded passenger rail service to Nashua.” What follows is reporting about the release of a 30-page report. An impossible dream that was unmasked on Granitegrok in 2017 when Nashua first embraced it.
In late April the NH Senate pulled a four million dollar rail study line-item out of the State’s ten-year transportation budget. The Senate passed the amended version, denying the choo-choo fetishists yet another expensive act of engineering voyeurism. The advocates for waste, fraud, and abuse were not happy.