Saturday, March 22, 2008
High-Speed Trains: The way to go for the USA
I am aware that building a new fast-speed railway network would be extremely expensive, but I have to wonder if we can afford not to build them.
Our airports are jammed to overflowing. Airspace is bulging at the seams. Each time a plane goes into the air, thousands of gallons of fuel are burned.
I am not suggesting that it is realistic to expect people to go from New York to California by train. But what about routes like Boston/New York/D.C.; Houston/Dallas; Detroit/Chicago; San Francisco/Los Angeles? Buses take a long time; planes are always delayed and are ever more expensive and trains don’t necessarily save time over buses, even though they are certainly more costly.
If England can have had the Inter-City 125, which goes up to 125mph, for longer than 30 years and now has faster trains; if Japan and other countries can have trains that go 200mph plus, then why should it take 4 hours to go 215 miles from New York to Boston? It is pathetic, absurd and absolutely inexcusable that the supposed most advanced country in the world has trains that can barely reach 60 miles per hour!
Why would anyone bother with airport traffic and parking; security check; delays before getting on the plane; hour long taxiing on the runway and, in the case of New York, inadequate transportation from airport to City if there was a decent train with a journey time of barely more than an hour to either Boston or D.C.?
For the sake of the environment (Al Gore, are you reading this?), air safety and the sanity and comfort of travellers, it is surely the only sensible path for the longer term and as I see it, inevitable. So do we start the 10-year talking process now, or do we talk about starting that process for the next 10 years…. or do we wait 10 years until we start talking about talking about it?
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Our airports are jammed to overflowing. Airspace is bulging at the seams. Each time a plane goes into the air, thousands of gallons of fuel are burned.
I am not suggesting that it is realistic to expect people to go from New York to California by train. But what about routes like Boston/New York/D.C.; Houston/Dallas; Detroit/Chicago; San Francisco/Los Angeles? Buses take a long time; planes are always delayed and are ever more expensive and trains don’t necessarily save time over buses, even though they are certainly more costly.
If England can have had the Inter-City 125, which goes up to 125mph, for longer than 30 years and now has faster trains; if Japan and other countries can have trains that go 200mph plus, then why should it take 4 hours to go 215 miles from New York to Boston? It is pathetic, absurd and absolutely inexcusable that the supposed most advanced country in the world has trains that can barely reach 60 miles per hour!
Why would anyone bother with airport traffic and parking; security check; delays before getting on the plane; hour long taxiing on the runway and, in the case of New York, inadequate transportation from airport to City if there was a decent train with a journey time of barely more than an hour to either Boston or D.C.?
For the sake of the environment (Al Gore, are you reading this?), air safety and the sanity and comfort of travellers, it is surely the only sensible path for the longer term and as I see it, inevitable. So do we start the 10-year talking process now, or do we talk about starting that process for the next 10 years…. or do we wait 10 years until we start talking about talking about it?
