Mass Transit - Documentary

Mass Transit Documentary

Technocracy:

Designed Direction Needed

Under the Price System of private enterprise, it is impossible to operate any physical equipment at a socially functional load factor.

The reason for this is that the Price System is an interference, financial control over production and distribution. Under this type of operations, functional load factors are, usually, incompatible with good business.

Technology, under a Price System, must always be throttled down. It can be allowed to operate only to the extent that it is profitable to private enterprise.

North America's railroads are efficient only to the extent that the rules of the Price System will permit, and no more. We cannot blame railroad technologists for this condition. They only work on the railroads and must obey orders from the financial controls over them.

North America's railroads need a complete overhauling and modernization, in line with what railroad technology knows how to do now, and in line with the transportation needs of this Continent and the people who inhabit it.

This can never be done under the Price System. However, it is technically practical and transportation technology knows how to do it. What is needed to solve the railroad problem is designed direction integrated with an overall scientific design of Continental social and industrial operations.

Technocracy Inc. has this design for operating the North American Continent.

The design is based upon scientific principles and will be carried out by technological methods.

In the North American Technate, the railroads will fulfill a different function than they do under the Price System. They will be integrated with a Continental System of Canals, lakes, seaways, deepened rivers and broad highways.

This system, in turn, will be integrated with an overall Continental Hydrology design for power production, transportation, reforestration, flood and erosion prevention, national defense, etc. Bulk freight will move by water at one-tenth of the energy cost required by rail.

It will move much faster than two miles an hour, which is the average speed of a freight car today, figured on its daily mileage basis.

The railroads will be widened to about 10 feet between the rails. Passenger and fast freight cars will, accordingly, be much wider and shorter.
Heavier rails will be used. This sums up to a set-up wherein great stability and high speed is possible.

With an overall transportation design like this. North America can scrap a large part of its existing railroad mileage. There will be no competition for business, and thus no necessity to concoct artificial freight car shortages for the purpose of maintaining an arbitrary scarcity so that more profit can be extracted from the traffic.

Now a Continental Hydrology, along with a Continent-wide system of rail transportation that Technocracy has designed, using the latest in diesel propulsion, on 3 meter gauge tracks, would provide faster, safer, and far more efficient transport for both freight and people. The two systems combined, the Hydrology and the rail system, would end for ever our dependance on any and all foreign sources for energy.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Mass
• Transit
• Cars
• transportation
• problems
• suburbia
• commuting
• peak
• oil
• trains
• public
• Automobile
• Train
• price
• system
• cities
• Transport
• Railroad
• roads
• highway
• Driving
• gas
• station
• traffic
• congestion
• Road
• pollution
• suburban
• electric
• car
• energy
• monorail
• buses
• bus
• passenger
• clean
• green

[TechnocracyNow]

@LONGPORKBUFFET

Only that nation which cannot devise a better system than communism need fear communism. Technocracy looks upon communism as being too bourgeois and conservative for North America, but sufficiently radical and revolutionary for the Old World.