Word: rails
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Americans and their attendant prosperity to far-off corners of the then-unsettled country. American passenger trains carried millions of new soldiers to their training depots and their ports of call during the two World Wars, and, until the expansion of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, rail travel remained the only reliable and affordable method for traversing the country. But, since then, American passenger rail has steadily declined in both prestige and ridership; in 1971, the federal government effectively bought out the dying industry under the aegis of the taxpayer-backed firm Amtrak...
...change may soon be coming to America. On Thursday, President Obama outlined a proposal that would revitalize the passenger rail network of the United States by providing $8 billion in funding from the recently passed $787 billion stimulus package for high-speed rail networks, especially along the Northeast Corridor. We applaud the president’s bold maneuver and hope to see him follow through on his lofty rhetoric with real change in the way that the federal government treats the entire issue of high-speed rail travel...
...Compared to the interstate highway system and the massive network of domestic airlines, high-speed rail is more energy-efficient and less costly per mile and provides an easy, efficient, and safe method of transportation. As such, we believe that a new national program of high-speed rail construction will be a worthwhile investment in infrastructure and job creation in the midst of the worst recession in more than two decades. In addition to the immediate benefits of job creation in the construction industry, the expansion of passenger rail travel will also provide jobs far into the future across...
National standards have long been the third rail of education politics. The right chokes on the word national, with its implication that the feds will trample on the states' traditional authority over public schools. And the left chokes on the word standards, with the intimations of assessments and testing that accompany it. The result is a K-12 education system in the U.S. that is burdened by an incoherent jumble of state and local curriculum standards, assessment tools, tests, texts and teaching materials. Even worse, many states have bumbled into a race to the bottom as they define their local...
However, all of the positive legislation and momentum will be pushed backward if several proposed changes to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority take place. Last week, officials of the MBTA released budgeting information that included major cuts to its subway services, including ending weekday commuter rail service after 7 p.m., removing customer service personnel from all stations, and cutting enough overall service from its bus lines and rail systems to generate a loss of over 40 million riders annually...