# GML's Advice for New Passenger Rail Advocates



## Green Maned Lion (Sep 5, 2014)

Every so (far too) often somebody comes on here and says we can create a new train with schedules to blah blah and especially blah. They even come up with play schedules for these play trains to their play cities that range from vaguely realistic to vaudeville. And then they say, "it would be nice to have such a train". Well duh.

I have been working for several years to get certain wealthy businessmen and their related politicians to sponsor the $50 million or so that would be needed to create and operate an hourly shuttle from Pottsville to Norristown connecting with Septa and run it for 5 years as a trial. My train's concept is a likely guaranteed success, since a large portion of the population along that route work in the Philly metro area, traffic along I-176 is appalling in the morning, and 422 is worse. I even have a liberal friend who has a ridiculous amount of money that he is in the process of giving away the bulk of to charity because he has no heirs thats sorta getting on board with backing my project. I'm talking about a natural rail corridor that saw service into the early 80's. I'm talking about dirt cheap operation. With my friends help, I think I have a 20% chance of succeeding. Without it, I'm pissing in the wind, and I know it. Were it not for a dinner conversation one night with this friend, I wouldn't have even started putting work into it. I refuse to waste my time.

You go about it backassward.

Step one: Come up with the idea. Propose it in your head. If you are grinning antecedently to laughter, ashcan it right here and don't go on to step two.

Step Two: Ask your self the five Ws:

1) Who is going to pay for it? If the answer is "They" stop. If the answer is Congress and you don't have an in, stop. If the answer is the state, and you don't have an in, stop. If the answer is a municipality, and you don't have an in, stop. And if the answer is a wealthy businessman and he isn't a personal friend you socialize with regularly, you should have been laughing at step one, doofus. If the answer is yourself, double your estimate and apply a monetary version of Hoftstadter's law. (It always costs more than you expect, even when taking this into account!)

2) Where are they going to get the money? Don't think in terms of vague notions of defunding what you consider unneeded projects. A tax? On what? A coalition of businessmen?How do you get affected people to go along with your plan? What ever you do, you have to have the people affected by the movement of money on board for your plan. If you can't figure out a way to get the people funding it ENTHUSIASTIC about it, stop. Do you know how many parents of children will vote against desperately needed school projects at referendums?

3) When do you think adequate funding can be amassed? Always Remember HOFTSTADTER'S LAW. You have to wait for properly aligned politics and get the wheels gaining huge momentum by the time the politics change. If you think it is going to start in less than a decade, stop. You are too naive to try this stuff.

4) Why are they going to pay for it? Seriously. You and I know trains are of great benefit to the world. They cure cancer and everything. But to people who don't ride them, what are they? An old, slow, antique reserved for socialists, the poor and the east coast elite. They are the devil because we train advocates not only want to force you to ride the train, we want to take your car away. You better have a convincing argument that includes things like allowing for increased highway maintenance and decreased congestion so that drivers can get to work more easily.

5) How much is it going to cost? Don't think on a government scale. Think about a number that can be swallowed by the average imbecile. You have people like Kaisch or whatever is name is by telling people this train project was going to cost Ohio taxpayers a few million a year. Chicken feed, I know, but the average person doesn't think like that. They think in terms of the $30,000 they make a year, the $20,000 they paid for a car over 5 years, and the $150,000 they paid for their house over 30. Don't even contemplate how much the DOD gets. If you can't make the number palatable to friends, stop.

Step Three: Go find a railroad engineer and find out if this project of yours is even feasible. I don't care how fast the Hummingbird or whatever ran over the track when my father was in high school, because its entirely irrelevant. I want to know if I am going to need to use chainsaws to cut through the trees that have grown up through whats left of the roadbed or not. I want to know how fast I can run that train given the traffic that runs over it now, the current track conditions, the current trackage status (Single? Double? Triple? Signaled? Dark? PTC?) and all the other intangibles. If you hear the words Rail Trail, stop. You can't buck the utter horror, the evil dark empire, the walking group that make audacity and smug nouns, known as cyclists. If any of this requires more than $100 million or so, don't even try to fight for it. Try to create a coalition. It won't work, but if you insist, try.

Step Four: Go to a vanity somewhere. Sit down in front of the mirror and stare deep into your own soul. Say to yourself out loud, "I am going to spend the rest of my life fighting for this because I believe in it. It is now my hobby. I will do nothing else. I won't have as much time to spend with my children or my family. I understand that after favorably completing every other step laid out by GreenManedLion, I truly believe I have something that may approach a ghost of a chance of improving the world. I will never be thanked for this. Most people including other rail people will think I am crazy and stupid and don't understand the political reality of the world. I will be verbally abused by fools. I may be threatened and bullied by people if I ever manage to accomplish a single thing. But I consider this important enough that I am willing to endure all this for the chance of improving the way of life for my descendants in an area I care deeply about and wish to benefit at my own great expense."

And if you can bring yourself to do all this, then you can post your ideas on this forum. Because then you have the commitment needed to actually bother other people with what you think is cool. I am so freakin' sick of people who just think that a train is a good idea and we should ask for it and it'll fall out of the sky complete with electrified Class 8 track and brand shining new Shinkensen sets and a billion dollar piggy bank to pay for operations. Talk about what you are personally willing to fight for. Anybody can talk the talk. Walk the walk first.


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## Bob Dylan (Sep 5, 2014)

Hope your plan works out Lion, good advice! I used to have an old girlfriend in that area and even then driving was a PITA to go see her!


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## SarahZ (Sep 5, 2014)

Dang, Lion. I feel like I should start a slow clap or something.


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## Ryan (Sep 5, 2014)

Agreed.


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## zephyr17 (Sep 5, 2014)

Green Maned Lion said:


> Every so (far too) often somebody comes on here and says we can create a new train with schedules to blah blah and especially blah. They even come up with play schedules for these play trains to their play cities that range from vaguely realistic to vaudeville. And then they say, "it would be nice to have such a train". Well duh.
> 
> I have been working for several years to get certain wealthy businessmen and their related politicians to sponsor the $50 million or so that would be needed to create and operate an hourly shuttle from Pottsville to Norristown connecting with Septa and run it for 5 years as a trial. My train's concept is a likely guaranteed success, since a large portion of the population along that route work in the Philly metro area, traffic along I-176 is appalling in the morning, and 422 is worse. I even have a liberal friend who has a ridiculous amount of money that he is in the process of giving away the bulk of to charity because he has no heirs thats sorta getting on board with backing my project. I'm talking about a natural rail corridor that saw service into the early 80's. I'm talking about dirt cheap operation. With my friends help, I think I have a 20% chance of succeeding. Without it, I'm pissing in the wind, and I know it. Were it not for a dinner conversation one night with this friend, I wouldn't have even started putting work into it. I refuse to waste my time.
> 
> ...


Amen and bravo!


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## neroden (Sep 5, 2014)

Thanks for that, GML.

The thing about Detroit-Toledo is that the state did a set of surveys of what Michiganders wanted out of rail service in the state. Turned out top priority was Detroit-Toledo service. The current governor is actively pushing a Grand Rapids-Lansing-Detroit line....

Some years ago, Amtrak reported that when people called their phone number to ask for train tickets and the city pair *wasn't possible by train*, the top requested unserved city pair was consistently NYC-Detroit....

Michigan seems to have managed to get a constellation of pro-passenger-rail politics which includes lots of the rich business interests in the state already....

There are multiple alternative routes: the Great Lakes Rail route through Ann Arbor, the route which runs west of the Detroit airport, and four more existing tracks on wide ROWs from Toledo to Detroit (under two different owners), and another two tracks of abandoned ROW (plus some more variant options)...

Land is cheap around there...

I don't think I can do much to influence MI from over here in NY (and frankly, NY politics is a *lot* harder to shift than MI politics). All I can do is to tell the people involved in doing the studies that they're lowballing their ridership estimates because they're thinking solely in terms of MI residents leaving the state, and ignoring out-of-staters bringing money into the state. Maybe it'll shift their mentality and they'll start paying attention to what the locals are *already telling them*.


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## MikefromCrete (Sep 5, 2014)

My gosh, the GML actually makes sense. Great post.


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## CHamilton (Sep 5, 2014)

GML has my vote for the post of the year.

But his realistic assessment doesn't mean that we should stop advocating for passenger rail. Far from it. We need to band together, with the following agenda:


Get support on the local and national level to maintain the skeletal system we have. 
Get support for more frequencies, and more equipment, for our current trains.
Get even a sliver of the funding that goes to new highway construction, to fix our crumbling rail infrastructure.
Get prepared for a 21st century that will be marked by major shifts in demographics and climate change, both of which will make our car-centric culture unviable. 
Get the rail plans in hand, so that if money becomes available, we can be "shovel-ready." Washington state got a lot of stimulus money, while Oregon didn't, because WA had its plans ready.
Get support to restart the trains we've lost in the last few years, where the infrastructure is already there.
I think that there are a lot of us who have realistic attitudes toward what is feasible and what isn't. We're the ones who need to convince the decision-makers that a rail future is not a pipe dream. Yes, maglev and hyperloops are fun to think about, but for now, it's more important to re-create the bipartisan support for passenger trains that was the norm until just recently.


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## Green Maned Lion (Sep 5, 2014)

CHamilton said:


> Get even a sliver of the funding that goes to new highway construction, to fix our crumbling rail infrastructure.


NO! Dear god NO. You missed one of my points. One of our biggest problems is an US and THEM attitude between car people and transit advocates. This has to STOP. Yes, highway funding is huge at the moment. But, despite a variety of completely wasteful projects going under that heading, it is also highly inadequate. Our roadways are crumbling. We do NOT advocate for less funding for roads. We can, perhaps, advocate a little for not building so many new ones, but I even discourage this. We need to push for funding rail and other transit, in addition to other funding currently ongoing. We can point out that other forms of transportation get funding, although I wouldn't even call road funding adequate, and try to argue for more funding for rail. Argue for more rail, not less highway.

So long as drivers think transit is their enemy, we are fighting against us. Nobody cares how much money is spent on trains. They care about how much money is diverted from what they personally care about.

You know, you keep talking about how good the rail network in western europe is so much better than ours. Your damned right it is. BUT SO IS THEIR HIGHWAY NETWORK! Its not a matter of which we choose to fund, but our willingness to spend money on infrastructure at all. More funding. More funding. You can't ask for the money to come from X or Y or Z because then X or Y or Z won't like you, and fight against you. We have enough built in enemies, and when we talk about spending less on highways, we give all of those foes every last bit of ammo they require. Not to mention that the basic premise of what you ask for is wrong, it is also counterproductive!


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## Anderson (Sep 5, 2014)

GML,

A sincere question if I might: One thing I have had trouble comprehending is how the cycling lobby wound up so strong. I know that in some cases, rail trails were often "bad" alignments that were abandoned for a very good reason (as they were often the worst of multiple routes between a given location pair). In some other cases the line is/was a rural leftover that didn't make much sense to begin with, built during one of the overbuilding booms. So I know why some lines haven't been considered for restoration (or why any passing efforts have been easily knocked aside). But it boggles my mind that trails which often see rather light use and attract at most modest tourism have wound up invulnerable to other uses.

Or is it more a case of the cycling lobby simply being the recipient of "other" opposition (NIMBYs, etc.) that makes them punch far above their weight?


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## neroden (Sep 5, 2014)

Anderson said:


> Or is it more a case of the cycling lobby simply being the recipient of "other" opposition (NIMBYs, etc.) that makes them punch far above their weight?


I think this is it. The trail forces are sometimes bankrolled & backed by folks who would happily allow the trail to deteriorate and be shut after it's "constructed". This is certainly the case in the Adirondacks.


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## Anderson (Sep 6, 2014)

This is now a separate thread; GML, thank you for this post.


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## rickycourtney (Sep 6, 2014)

Anderson said:


> GML,
> 
> A sincere question if I might: One thing I have had trouble comprehending is how the cycling lobby wound up so strong. I know that in some cases, rail trails were often "bad" alignments that were abandoned for a very good reason (as they were often the worst of multiple routes between a given location pair). In some other cases the line is/was a rural leftover that didn't make much sense to begin with, built during one of the overbuilding booms. So I know why some lines haven't been considered for restoration (or why any passing efforts have been easily knocked aside). But it boggles my mind that trails which often see rather light use and attract at most modest tourism have wound up invulnerable to other uses.
> 
> Or is it more a case of the cycling lobby simply being the recipient of "other" opposition (NIMBYs, etc.) that makes them punch far above their weight?


This is simply anecdotal... but consider the people who are the most passionate cyclists... young, well educated, tech savvy and politically active. Cyclists are a small group but all of those things have added up to making them a political force to be reckoned with.

But, rail trails are falling out of public opinion for a few reasons:


True cyclists don't want to be separated from traffic, they want effective bike lanes on existing streets.
As you mentioned, these rail trails often provide a convenient way to get from nowhere to nowhere, which makes them a poor investment for cash strapped cities.
After several lawsuits it's been proven that in most cases railroads do not own the land where the tracks run, they simply have an easement over that land. When the railroads sold off old lines to cities to become trails... the cities had no idea they didn't own the land and they get sued by the landowners.
Many neighbors (rightly or wrongly) think that trails attract undesirable people looking for a secluded place to hang out.


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## Paulus (Sep 6, 2014)

One thing I should point out is that there's a lot of things that can be done to make existing transit much better without super major capital investments like the fantasy rail lines have. That can range from better use of existing equipment for more frequencies (such as is currently being looked at for the Surfliner) to mobile ticketing to proof of purchase ticketing (SEPTA, looking at you here) to level boarding or other means of decreasing dwell time (painted queue lines aligned to where doors should be is one cheap possibility). But for some reason this stuff gets a lot less push than the fantasy maps and whatnot.


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## Anderson (Sep 6, 2014)

Paulus said:


> One thing I should point out is that there's a lot of things that can be done to make existing transit much better without super major capital investments like the fantasy rail lines have. That can range from better use of existing equipment for more frequencies (such as is currently being looked at for the Surfliner) to mobile ticketing to proof of purchase ticketing (SEPTA, looking at you here) to level boarding or other means of decreasing dwell time (painted queue lines aligned to where doors should be is one cheap possibility). But for some reason this stuff gets a lot less push than the fantasy maps and whatnot.


I'll call it the "shiny" problem: A new train is shiny. A new high-speed train is _very_ shiny (regardless of actual paint job). These things get attention easily, while incremental improvements like you mention (even if they might do more) simply don't get the easy attention.


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## Green Maned Lion (Sep 6, 2014)

Paulus said:


> One thing I should point out is that there's a lot of things that can be done to make existing transit much better without super major capital investments like the fantasy rail lines have. That can range from better use of existing equipment for more frequencies (such as is currently being looked at for the Surfliner) to mobile ticketing to proof of purchase ticketing (SEPTA, looking at you here) to level boarding or other means of decreasing dwell time (painted queue lines aligned to where doors should be is one cheap possibility). But for some reason this stuff gets a lot less push than the fantasy maps and whatnot.


That is absolutely true.


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## Ispolkom (Sep 6, 2014)

rickycourtney said:


> True cyclists don't want to be separated from traffic, they want effective bike lanes on existing streets.


True cyclists are happy to ride on unmarked streets. They take their lane, pedal a straight, predictable line, and obey traffic regulations. Bike lanes just put you in the door zone of parked cars, and encourage cars to speed and to do right hooks (the most likely way I'll get killed on a bicycle, I imagine). They might encourage newbies to ride, but probably just give an illusion of safety.

Heck, I'd rather have a sharrow than a bike lane. Instead of either, though, I'd prefer police enforcement of speed and distracted driving laws.

The main thing I have as a cyclist against rail trails is that they are usually multiuse trails, and in urban environments that means lots of pedestrians, who are usually distracted and always unpredicatable. Rural trails, though, are often quite sparsely used, and can be very scenic. Some day I hope to take a bicycle out west to try some of the former Milwaukee Road right of way, like the sections through the Bitterroot Mountains and over Snoqualmie Pass.


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## Green Maned Lion (Sep 7, 2014)

See? That's the kind of entitled attitude cyclists tend to have, biking four abreast down a country road "using the lane" at 25 mph on a road where most traffic wants to do 60, and refusing to allow people to pass them. Cyclists should be restricted to bike lanes. They make the roads unsafe with their arrogance about outdated "rights".


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## Eric S (Sep 7, 2014)

Paulus said:


> One thing I should point out is that there's a lot of things that can be done to make existing transit much better without super major capital investments like the fantasy rail lines have. That can range from better use of existing equipment for more frequencies (such as is currently being looked at for the Surfliner) to mobile ticketing to proof of purchase ticketing (SEPTA, looking at you here) to level boarding or other means of decreasing dwell time (painted queue lines aligned to where doors should be is one cheap possibility). But for some reason this stuff gets a lot less push than the fantasy maps and whatnot.


Proof of purchase ticketing ought to enable a significant increase in off-peak service at relatively little expense (potentially lower labor costs, using existing equipment). And not just SEPTA (although with their great S-Bahn-ish infrastructure they are perhaps the most obvious example), but I'd also say most or all of the larger commuter rail operations (LIRR, MNRR, NJT, Metra, MBTA).


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## Paulus (Sep 7, 2014)

Green Maned Lion said:


> See? That's the kind of entitled attitude cyclists tend to have, biking four abreast down a country road "using the lane" at 25 mph on a road where most traffic wants to do 60, and refusing to allow people to pass them. Cyclists should be restricted to bike lanes. They make the roads unsafe with their arrogance about outdated "rights".


Do feel free to lobby for the law to be changed, I'm sure it'll go over swimmingly.

Also, as someone who lives in an area with a large number of cyclists using the rural county highway, they're rather better and safer at it than the drivers, as the daily "Off to the trauma hospital" sirens will attest. You're also neglecting that cities and other agencies have a tendency to actively work against such things (again, locally, they took out a bike lane to put in an utterly pointless median for aesthetic reasons).


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## jis (Sep 7, 2014)

Green Maned Lion said:


> See? That's the kind of entitled attitude cyclists tend to have, biking four abreast down a country road "using the lane" at 25 mph on a road where most traffic wants to do 60, and refusing to allow people to pass them. Cyclists should be restricted to bike lanes. They make the roads unsafe with their arrogance about outdated "rights".


I tend to agree with that. Cyclist are also not the best of road rule followers. They are no better than drivers nd often are far worse, happily biking away in the direction opposite to the traffic and such.


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## neutralist (Sep 7, 2014)

Apparently my part of the original thread did not got moved over, so I am copying that here.

-------

http://discuss.amtraktrains.com/index.php?/topic/61204-will-amtrak-permanently-re-route-the-cl-lsl/&do=findComment&comment=553419



neutralist said:


> There are reasons why the Chinese government are more effcient and done more with less money. Democracy is a blessing as well as a curse.


http://discuss.amtraktrains.com/index.php?/topic/61204-will-amtrak-permanently-re-route-the-cl-lsl/&do=findComment&comment=553491



neroden said:


> It's not just democracy which is the issue. There's a matter of organizational culture. China has for thousands of years had a massive cultural respect for competent bureaucracy (to the point where their vision of the afterlife is the "Celestial Bureaucracy") and a massive cultural hostility to incompetent bureaucracy. Bureaucrats who don't do their job get hanged or shot. Bureaucrats who do a good job get accolades and great respect.
> 
> We don't have the same *attitude* towards bureaucracy in the US. Since both railroads and infrastructure building thrive on giant bureaucracies...


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It is also that because of the individualistic culture that were deeply engrained in the U.S. Everything is "ME ME ME".

We have an old Chinese proverb, " 犧牲小我 , 完成大我 " , describe the solution perfectly. I will let you figure out what it means.


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## neutralist (Sep 8, 2014)

Green Maned Lion said:


> it'll fall out of the sky complete with electrified Class 8 track and brand shining new Shinkensen sets and a billion dollar piggy bank to pay for operations.


The money is there. This country has the infrasturcture, resources and money to feed one billion people ALONE.

All the government debt are in US Dollars so they have the right to just print and pay it off (remember the trillion dollar coin?)

We have enough oil for our own use. without import. The f**king leftists are the one stopping us drilling in full force.

We have enough food if we stop converting corns into ethanol. (There are tons of other non-edible stuff that can be used for fuel, like switchgrass).

Our biggest enemy is located right inside, planted from the outside. The future of our civilzation depends if the citizens have the willpower to fight for the status quo. in traditional or non-traditional means.


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## Green Maned Lion (Sep 8, 2014)

All of that is absolutely true. But in the current situations I want to get my project off the ground, and that ain't happening. So I can either point to that reality, and people will think I have an ego the size of Jupiter, and the gall and insanity to go with it. Or I can stay within the realities and strongly held misconceptions and attempt to actually get a train Turing a wheel in revenue service to Reading.

Given the relative chances of success, I pick the latter.


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## Paulus (Sep 8, 2014)

neutralist said:


> We have enough oil for our own use. without import. The f**king leftists are the one stopping us drilling in full force.


Because it isn't a good thing to drill everywhere and quite frankly, we need to stop burning oil period. Increased oil drilling isn't helped by things like Deepwater Horizon right after Obama announced he was going to allow more off-shore drilling.



> We have enough food if we stop converting corns into ethanol. (There are tons of other non-edible stuff that can be used for fuel, like switchgrass).


Yeah, the corn to ethanol thing is pretty dumb, but it isn't taking food away from America. We're the number one producer of an awful lot of food; in terms of value we export about 20% of our agricultural produce.



> Our biggest enemy is located right inside, planted from the outside. The future of our civilzation depends if the citizens have the willpower to fight for the status quo. in traditional or non-traditional means.


Kudzu's nasty man but that's a bit over the top.


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## neroden (Sep 12, 2014)

Anderson said:


> Paulus said:
> 
> 
> > One thing I should point out is that there's a lot of things that can be done to make existing transit much better without super major capital investments like the fantasy rail lines have. That can range from better use of existing equipment for more frequencies (such as is currently being looked at for the Surfliner) to mobile ticketing to proof of purchase ticketing (SEPTA, looking at you here) to level boarding or other means of decreasing dwell time (painted queue lines aligned to where doors should be is one cheap possibility). But for some reason this stuff gets a lot less push than the fantasy maps and whatnot.
> ...


At least some of these "simpler" things have the backing of the disability advocacy lobby... and delays in train boarding due to bad procedure obviously attract the attention of everyone who is delayed boarding... perhaps the key issue is that these things don't affect most Congressmen. 
If we broke the legs of all our Congressmembers and put them on the no-fly list, I wonder how fast things would get changed? ;-)


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## jis (Sep 12, 2014)

They'd pass a law making no fly lists illegal, and require the availability of more of those electric go carts at the airports. That's all that will happen unfortunately.


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## Bob Dylan (Sep 12, 2014)

jis said:


> They'd pass a law making no fly lists illegal, and require the availability of more of those electric go carts at the airports. That's all that will happen unfortunately.


I think they'd call the Air Force and demand an Executive Jet to transport them and Liter Bearers to take them to the Jet from the VIP Lounge! Needless to say they'd skip the Blue Shirt Inquisition!


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