Super Trains: Plans to Fix U.S. Rail Could End Road & Sky Gridlock
With airports and highways more congested than ever, new steel-wheel and maglev lines that move millions in Europe and Japan have the potential to resurrect the age of American railroads.
Acela notwithstanding, high-speed rail has been a difficult sell in this country because of high startup costs and the traditional reliability of our air and highway transportation systems. But it’s increasingly apparent that, in many areas, those systems are reaching capacity. The average commuter spends 38 hours per year stuck in traffic. And air travelers are spending more time in security lines and waiting on the runway before they ever get into the air. According to the Department of Transportation, 2007 is on track to be the worst year in the past decade for airport delays, with 25 percent of flights arriving late.
Furthermore, all that waiting costs money—and fuel. The Texas Transportation Institute estimates that last year U.S. drivers wasted 2.9 billion gal. of fuel sitting in traffic. That kind of inefficiency is becoming increasingly worrisome, with oil cracking $80 a barrel and all those idling engines generating significant greenhouse gas emissions. By contrast, high-speed trains draw power from the electrical grid, which is fueled primarily by domestically produced energy sources, such as coal. Plus, trains require about a third as much energy per passenger mile as automobiles (see above). Although nothing powered through the grid is entirely carbon-neutral, high-speed trains produce no direct emissions. “In the United States, some people are commuting to and from work over 200 miles a day using expensive fuel on dangerous highways,” says Rod Diridon, chair emeritus of the California High-Speed Rail Authority. “We’re going to have a tough time meeting any reasonable standards of pollution control if we continue to rely upon automobiles and short-hop airlines for our transportation needs.”
Building high-speed train routes in the U.S. would not be easy or cheap. Almost every proposed route faces some sort of political fight, and, depending on who you ask and what technology you’re considering, the cost per mile of high-speed rail is anywhere from $5 million to $100 million. However, more and more transportation engineers and cityplanners are starting to see high-speed rail as the only rational way to ease the strain that booming populations are placing on their already overwhelmed infrastructure. “By 2035, the six counties in the Los Angeles region will add roughly 6 million people—that’s the size of two Chicagos—to the 18 million residents already living here,” says Richard J. Marcus of the Southern California Association of Governments. “How are all those people going to get around?”
As our current transportation infrastructure groans under the stress, the idea of high-speed trains is starting to catch on. Eleven existing railway corridors in the U.S. are undergoing improvements for an upgrade to high-speed steel-wheel rail. Some of the most advanced, such as those in California, may be running trains as fast as 170 mph within 11 years. In addition, there are several maglev projects in development—one connecting the Pittsburgh airport and city center; another between Atlanta and Chattanooga, Tenn.; and a third that would link Baltimore and Washington, D.C. While some maglev proposals have mini-mal support, others are being promoted by well-organized, politically connected operations. The most ambitious is the California-Nevada Interstate Maglev Project described earlier.
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