Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 30, 1994 TAG: 9405020118
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
We shouldn't have needed a Worldwatch Institute report (April 17 Associated Press story, ``All aboard! Trains on fast track'') to tell us that trains are more efficient than cars or trucks to move people and cargo. It takes one driver to haul one or two trailers. But two workers can manage a train hauling 100 trailers.
We worry about good jobs for this area. Good-paying jobs come when productivity rises. With two train workers hauling up to 25 times more cargo than two truck drivers, transportation workers' productivity can rise by a phenomenal 25 percent. Businesses can better use their truck drivers for delivering cargo from trains to its destination, something only trucks can do.
The result of such a system would also make truck drivers' jobs and lives better - no more being away from home and family for long stretches; no more deep fatigue that comes from alternating driving with sleeping and eating and nothing else.
Governments should wake up to the efficiencies of rail, using our taxes to encourage it. As the author of the Worldwatch study said, lawmakers claim we cannot afford to subsidize Amtrak, ``but you never hear a congressman asking if we can afford highway travel.'' Yet highway travel, because it's so inefficient, costs twice as much as railroad travel. To quote the study again: ``Two railroad tracks can carry as many people in an hour as a 16-lane highway.'' Do we want 16-lane highways here?
It's possible, given the will to do it, to have passenger service in Roanoke, and at a much lower cost than plane travel, which costs seven times as much. By encouraging rail use for both cargo and passengers, we can reach the 21st century with a truly modern transportation system.
PRISCILLA RICHARDSON
CLOVERDALE
Legendary formula found in Wythe
REGARDING the April 6 news article by staff writer Paul Dellinger, ``Wythe legend comes to an end'':
In 1972, the late H.B. Sharitz, who was at that time deputy treasurer of Wythe County, told me that in the early 1900s a relative of his (I believe an uncle) purchased the building that had been operated as a drug store by Charles Pepper. In going through some papers and personal effects left in the building by Pepper, he found the formula for the soft drink now known as Dr. Pepper and forwarded it to Pepper's relatives. I recall Sharitz saying that the relatives mentioned above lived in Texas.
CURTIS D. THOMAS
MAX MEADOWS
Why not ban booze in restaurants?
WHAT'S happened to our freedom of rights?
I couldn't believe my eyes when I read the April 9 news article that they're banning smoking in the malls (``Region's malls to ban smoking'' by staff writer Michael Stowe).
What about alcoholic beverages being sold in restaurants? Do you ever see a nonalcohol section? The restaurant in Valley View Mall serves alcoholic beverages. Drunken drivers kill more people than cigarettes.
Our world's coming to dictatorship and no more freedom of rights. Retailers will find their nose has been cut off to spite their own face.
PEGGY TRIMNAL
ROANOKE
In Israel, `collective punishment'
RECENTLY, members of the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas, irately objected to an Israeli roundup of 70 of their testosterone-crazed group, calling the crackdown ``collective punishment.'' And what do they call bombing a bus?
BOB SHIELDS
ROANOKE
Cal, thanks for incisive column
IN DISCUSSING Justice Harry Blackmun's retirement, Cal Thomas writes (April 13 column, ``Only change in hearts will change abortion legacy'') that Blackmun is part of an age in which a virus of immorality has touched us all. He adds that Blackmun, in sponsoring the court's Roe decision legalizing abortions, was as guilty of the murder of unborn babies as was Pontius Pilate 2,000 years ago when he yielded to the crowd and condemned to death the innocent Jesus. But, Thomas writes, ``we have lost this common sense of justice because we have expunged the law-giver [God] from the center of our nation.'' This is so sadly true.
Thanks to Thomas for his incisive column.
ELIZABETH McNEAL
ROANOKE
by CNB