One of the challenges we face is that the Northeast Corridor has a lot of curvature, a lot of geometry. That’s its Acela line in the Northeast Corridor running between D.C., New York and Boston. Train systems reaching top speeds of over 110 to 150 miles per hour are generally considered high-speed and only one of Amtrak’s lines could be considered as such. It’s operated as a for-profit company but the federal government is its majority stakeholder. Right now the main passenger rail option in the U.S. One survey showed 63% of Americans would use high-speed rail if it was available to them. America, I think, is waking up to this idea that rail is a good investment for transportation infrastructure. Where rail exists and it’s convenient and high-speed, it’s very popular. There’s a sort of a rule of thumb for trips that are under three or four hours in trip length from city to city, those usually end up with about 80 or 90 percent of the travel market from aviation. They did it because it was a nicer option to take high-speed rail. When the high-speed rail between Madrid and Barcelona in Spain came into operation, I mean air travel just plummeted between those cities and everyone switched over to high-speed rail which was very convenient. That’s a much lower emission way of traveling. It’s largely an environmental good to switch from air traffic and car traffic to electrified high-speed rail. There are limits at airports, there is aviation congestion, so what are the options?Ī better rail system is one and could come with significant benefits. who are recognizing they are running out of space to expand their highways or interstates. When you look at what’s happening with the corridor development, again states across the U.S. But according to some, this country’s transportation ecosystem is reaching a tipping point. We average some 850 cars per thousand inhabitants in the U.S., in China it’s only 250.Īnd we’ve never gone back. This is the American dream of freedom on wheels. Not to mention the fact that in our political system we have very powerful oil lobbies, car manufacturing lobbies, aviation lobbies, all the entities that the high-speed rail would have to compete with. We’ve become a car culture and it’s hard to break out of that cycle. We went from a rail-served country to a auto-dependent nation by the 1960s. We dedicated a huge amount of dollars to building automobile infrastructure in the middle of the 20th century and we’re still kind of attached to that model of development. The federal government paid for 90% of that, the states covered the final 10 and rail fell by the wayside.Ĭan’t you see that this highway means a whole new way of life for the children? And a way of life that we have a chance to help plan and, and to build. It allocated about $25 billion dollars to build 41,000 miles of highways. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill to create the National Interstate System. General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil and a few other companies that got together and they were able to buy up all the nation’s streetcar systems and then quickly start phasing out service and literally dismantling all the systems over about a 10-year span. The inflexible rails permanently embedded in cobblestones were paved over to provide smooth, comfortable transportation via diesel motor coach. It all was working great except a number of companies in the auto and oil industries decided that for them to have a prosperous future they really needed to basically help phase out all the rail and get us all into cars. If you look at the United States prior to 1945, we had a very extensive rail system everywhere. used to be one of the world’s global leaders in rail but after World War II, there was a massive shift. They’ve become a staple for domestic travel and have moved more than 9 billion people without a single passenger casualty.įrance began service of the high-speed TGV train in 1981 and the rest of Europe quickly followed.Īnd high-speed rail is quickly expanding all over the world in places like India, Saudi Arabia, Russia Iran and Morocco.Īnd then there’s the U.S. Japan’s bullet trains can reach speeds of almost 200 miles per hour. The country has more than 19,000 miles of high-speed rail, the vast majority of which was built in the last decade. China has the fastest and largest high-speed rail network in the world.
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