Water - regardless of where in America you're at - is a vital issue.
Yes it is. and there really isn't enough og it in south Texas to fill hundreds of miles of ridiculous 19th century style brick lined aquaducts for the porpose of transporting frieght at 4MPH. Nor is there enough of it in any of the desert regions. Water also has a tendency to freeze in the winter, and the Great plains run uphill a mile between the Mississippi and Denver. Water don't run uphill y'know. Then it's another mile up to get across the Rockies. Your Barge Canal theory is as dumbassed a scheme as I ever heard of.
There's still plenty of Railroad tracks and right of ways that can easily be upgraded for high speed rail, both for freight and passenger service. The day will come when your gas guzzler will be too expensive to drive around. Maybe not in your lifetime, maybe not even in mine. But that day is coming. Truckers and lone commuters in 10mpg pickemup trucks will be a thing of the distant past. Digging barge canals to fill with precious fresh water is not going to be an option either.
All of which goes to prove you're far more "ideological" than I, Greger ! OTOH, even I do know how canal boats can go "uphill" even as water flows down. But let's hear your engineering precis on how to build "200 mph freight roads", by all means ! Or your political one on how to create freight spurs in urban areas economically !
"High-speed passenger rail" - where you go sixty + mph until the next station 10 miles down the track - stop and a couple of dozen depart/ board while hundreds wait. A couple of hundred people stopping/starting in order to board/discharge a dozen ! (Yeah that's "efficiency "!)
OTOH we could create a system of elevated "interurban cars/carriage systems" using the the median/sides of extant highways providing efficient point-to-point transport in, say, 12-15 passenger packets moving at 40-50 mph. Developed like a tree, systems would use standardized "cars" operating solely on remote control and shunting from the "main line" in order to discharge/pickup passengers to be met by "locals" of the same ilk.
Not too long back the local paper published an old account of two individuals traveling from Easton, PA to Ohio and returning in a couple of days on a similar, terrestrial system. Now all you have to do is claim our grandfathers could do something we can't !
The lack of the foregoing is ONE of the reasons we have folks commuting sixty+ miles in "pickemup" trucks. The other is government interference. Until government stepped in, the "sine qua non" of the suburban set was the station wagon. It was built on a car chassis.
EPA CAFE regs killed them. But didn't "kill the need" . Hence the emergence of the SUV. (Which, BTW, weren't subject to "car safety regs" so mfgs, happily embraced the SUV and loaded it up with all sorts of "gee whiz" features attractive to the suburban set. Never mind the CG and ride height meant truck handling and "enthusiastic driving" meant dead bodies. The consumer - and most importantly government was "happy" !
America is awash in energy ! We've got trillions of units of NG in proven fields. Like wise billions of barrels of oil in proven fields. But there is one "holdup:". The Obama Administration ! Its halted development of inshore, shallow water development in the Gulf, blocked terrestrial development of the Baakken Field in the midwest and done everything but declare martial law to slow development of Marcellus Shale ! One must wonder what the "objective" of the Obama Administration is, since its "estimates" of the efficiency and impact of its touted "green alternative energy" schemes aren't proving out in reality and killing a lot of wildlife along the way.
But not of this is going to help the plight of the OO trucker ! It appears he's going to get slammed on his punkin with yet another in a long litany of federal mandates favoring the unions and the ATA. And, as usual, the consummer will have to pay.... >Mech
