Thursday, August 11, 2011

Buy American

Not necessarily against such provisions in general, but they do cause a lot of problems in the market for SUPERTRAINS. If we actually had some sort of decent national policy and coordination between transit agencies, we could probably create sufficient sustained demand for rail cars (both inter-city and light rail systems) to support domestic production, but given the low level of demand, the great uncertainty about funding any of these projects, and the fact that no coordination means no 'off the rack' models can be made, buying American becomes complicated and expensive.