Brad, thank you for highlighting this problem. The American bias towards highway spending endangers our environment, public health, and energy security, It's really appalling. We have the passenger rail system of a 3rd World country. It's impossible to safely traverse most of our cities without a car. What's more, Americans can no longer envision a different transportation reality.

Yup.  Spend just a week in Europe, cheerfully bypassing cars and airplanes, by talking affordable, accessible mass transit both inter and intra-city, and you'll never feel the same way about cars and highways and airplanes again.

Richard Posner (of course) has the answer --they're a way for airlines to ration plane travel without

What people fail to realize is that transit and rail don't work with the land use pattern we've spent the last 60 years or so developing in the US. For those who live in cities and towns with reasonably density, transit DOES work in the US. But if you live on a one or two acre lot in the suburbs, transit can't serve you cost effectively if at all. Yeah, park and ride lots and things like that can help, but you're still doing a couple of cold-starts every day (cold-starting a car is one of the prime causes of emissions), so its only a marginal improvement.

When people are willing to give up their suburban lifestyles for living in areas with 4-6 residential units per acre (or more), we can start bitching about our transit system. Until then, take a look in the mirror. I live in a town in a very dense development with plenty of transit access and I walk and ride a bike for most trips (I drive less than 5,000 miles per year), so I can be self-righteous about this one. There are plenty of other ways that I'm not as environmentally conscientious as I should be.

Ramborider has a fair point; greens and politicians often blithely talk about "use transit, bike more, etc" completely ignoring or unaware of the large numbers of people for whom that simply isn't an option. This is true for both rural and suburban dwellers. It's a larger problem because I feel it tends to make people tune out of other green/environmental concerns, because it makes those advocates seem (fairly) out-of-touch with reality.

However, far too often these discussions stay trapped in a mindset that "rail" means "commuting near cities". As the first two commenters point out, rail has the potential to serve far more than just commuters. One of the core powers of the European rail network is not its commuter service, but its ability to move people between cities large and small over mid-range distances. This is a model that could very well apply to the US, and would go a long way toward easing the airline and highway congestion we're currently suffering.

For example, consider a high-speed rail network linking MIdwestern cities such as Detroit, Chicago, St Louis, and M-StP. It is entirely viable to establish regular, round-the-clock, fast service between those cities such that business people, tourists, and regional travelers would no longer need to use either highways or airlines. The travel time would fall between air and car, and would be far more convenient and productive than either. Whether or not a subsidary system could carry commuters within the radius of those cities, a mid-range inter city network would substantially buffer our highway and air systems.

This does not apply just to large cities. Consider my home state, Missouri. Kansas City and St Louis are roughly 4-5 hours apart by car, on a straight-line highway. Halfway between lies Columbia, pop.100,000 with a major state university. Lots of people travel between these three cities every day for various reasons, not necessarily commuting. Rather than expand I-70 to eight lanes (as is currently being proposed), stick a high-speed rail line down the median of the highway, with a stop at Columbia and a couple suburbs near the big cities. This wouldn't carry commuters, necessarily, but it would carry business people, airline travellers moving between airports, tourists, folks going to sporting events, and anyone else with any reason to move between the three short of actual daily commuting. Similar networks between other cities would very soon create a viable regional network that served a significant fraction of the population.

For example, I won't drive three hours to St Louis for a sporting event very often, especially if I won't get home until after midnight. But I might drive as far as Columbia, and hop a train, knowing that I'll be dumped downtown and can sleep both ways. It would increase business in the cities for sure.

Just thoughts. People advocating rail and other alternative transportation need to think beyong commuters and consider the wider pattern of travel in the US.

ramboo and literate...you both bring up valid points but one of the things about Federal Highway Funding and Public Transit is that it's as much reflects the land planning strategies of the last 60 years. It isn't just a simple case of suburbanites not being able to walk, ride or take public transit because it's impossible or prohibitively expensive, it's the fact that most and by that I mean 80% of Americans, even in rather urbanized suburbs will choose to drive the 1 mile to run errands rather than take alternate means of transport.

Having lived in both a rural and urban environment within the last 6 years and the pro and cons to each, I'd have to say I'd prefer the city not because I don't like living in the middle of nowhere and by that I mean the nearest store or gas station being 25 minutes away and having 4 neighbors, but it was literally the commute time to work. I can handle driving into town on Saturday to do the grocery shopping, go to the hardware and feed store. But driving 80 miles round trip to work just sucks! Plain and simple. That being said, city living is pricier but I don't drive at all. I bike commute to work 3-5 days a week, take metro if I need to and use the car for specific weekend errands. There are trade offs but losing 2+ hours a day to driving in traffic is not worth living so far away from work. Until most Americans realize the cost of commuting and errand running is more than just gas, they won't change their behavior. Add up the hours commuting to work and you realize how much time you lose doing so.

Federal Highway dollars for the longest time excluded funding for bicycle lanes and sidewalks. Traffic engineers loathe those things because it messes up their traffic numbers. Politicians consider those things superfluous to their road improvements. Developers for suburban housing developments don't provide sidewalks much either because who walks in the suburbs? You're either weird or questionably suspicious if you're walking somewhere out in the 'burbs. Combined with the bias that automobile drivers have to anyone that is on their "god given" road, one wonders why many people don't walk or ride a bike.

There are cities and outlying suburbs that successfully use micro bus system on shorter route schedules to break down the wait times for bus uses. Multimodal transport systems existed in many major American and minor cities prior to the 1950s when American automakers conspired to convince Federal and State governments to eliminate street car and trolley service systems to promote car use.

Los Angeles used to have one of the best street car / trolley mass transit systems in the U.S. prior to WW2. Before it was ripped out and replaced with Auto industry back buses and car ownership promotions.

Combine these issues with the overwhelming promotion of the suburban lifestyle and it has led to the degradation of the quality of life in American cities, small towns and suburbs. Even small cities where you had walkable communities, they've been reworked in the name of transit progress by widening roads to expedite car travel and promote leap frog sprawl development. No regard is given to how you interact with that environment outside of a car.

What you're now seeing in some metropolitan areas like Denver where they voted to expand the light rail system, the first ring of suburban cities like Arvada, Glendale, LIttleton, etc are concentrating on building light rail nodes in their older town centers, redeveloping them for higher mixed use densities, and promoting carless means of travel within their own town limits by connecting to adjacent bike trails and plugging into the expanding light rail system. This required getting 12 metropolitan mayors and councils in and around Denver to buy into the idea of a regional mass transit system in an effort to address the traffic issues created by 50 years of sprawl. The other idea is concentrating basic services near these nodes to encourage folks to combine their errands into a single trip by walking, riding a bike, taking mass transit or using their car wisely and getting beyond the psychology of the car.

An example of this psychology of the car.  A university friend of mine is doing a study of commercial development in Blacksburg, VA. Basically a college town whose small town CBD has been decimated by outlying big box development. CBD businesses are sparse and like all small town CBDs, ebb and flow with marginal services that people don't use or won't use. Even if they live within a mile or so nearby.  What he discovered was that by overlaying the parking lot and building footprint of the new Super Wal-Mart over the CBD district with small businesses was that a person walked farther and longer to park, walk and shop at the Wal-Mart than parking in town walking around the CBD to shop. The Wal-Mart parking lot and building footprint were larger than the area of the CBD.

Why? It was predicated on sight lines. The perception to the average shopper was that the Wal-Mart building and interior goods were "closer" to walk to than the local shops in the CBD. Even though the CBD store was around the corner and less than 100feet away from where they parked it was perceived as "too far" because they couldn't see it! His study showed that with CBD promotion for small businesses and services for local shoppers (within a two mile radius) and driving to the CBD that people actually walked shorter distances to use the services, the quality of the CBD was improved and the small town qualities returned. This is just an example of how the promotion of sprawl connected with highway expansion and promotion become linked.

But solving these issues by mere funding transfers, planning or political means is complex and difficult to achieve overnight let alone within a decade or two. Of course when the two words Americans hate the most are Sprawl and Density you can begin to understand what we're up against.

And how, pray tell, will we get to the train station? Or are you proposing that we make train stations in front of everyone's home? Reading the first few comments here is an exercise in absurdity.  Clearly, we have greenie baby-boomer europhiles who think the system is Europe is so much better than in the US.  Western Europe has no land mass at all; countries are the sizes of American states.  With their national GDP, of course they can cover the land with train tracks.  They have to, they cannot have cars all over the road or there'd be mass traffic jams.  

Here in America, we have planes for long distance travel and cars for short.  Mid-range travel is rarely done at all in fact.  Anything over 300 miles is a plane ride.  The reason train travel is not popular in the US is because there is no demand for it; it is a costly experiment in waste.  Amtrak has suffered immensely because of lack of consumer demand.  No one wants to ride a train on a trip longer than 300 miles and anything shorter is much more conveniently done by auto.

singlespeed,

I've done a fair amount of reading on the subject, and I agree with your history and analysis. For the reasons you give, addressing the issue near people's homes is especially difficult. Addressing it in the future is also problematic, because "better" designs and innovations often are implementing as part of yet more development and sprawl, so what you end up with is a double ring. Choked-off downtown, surrounded by a ring of useless sprawl, surrounded by perhaps better designed islands of development but still islands in a larger sea. I don't want to change people's approaches by plowing under even more farmland to build the "right" thing while leaving the wrong thing behind. Your example of Denver's ring towns is a better approach, but that's not always how it happens. Look at the fears regarding the expansanion of the DC Metro out to Dulles, and how that might encourage even more development because of the existence of the rail line. This would also be a concern in the Missouri example I gave above.

Ironically, that's often how the original sprawl suburbs developed. They were built in the 20s, 30s, and 40s along rail lines that still offered high-speed regular service to cities (such as the New Haven's lines along the New England seaboard), and were intended to be centered on those rail lines. The roads were never planned for people to drive from the commuter towns. But the rise in cars and wealth post-WW2 undercut the railroads, killed the passenger service, and left the country with chains of poorly planned (for cars) towns strung together. Thus began the cycle.

The nearest city to my farm is a classic example of well-meaning and out-of-touch leaders The city leaders like to think they're green, and are actively building bike paths and so on, yet they continue to rubber-stamp nearly every development and road project that comes their way, creating the worst of both worlds: unsustainable development, and a thin veneer of better ideas that can be easily dismissed by doubters as expensive boondoggles for yuppies. Of course no one uses that expensive, wide bike line along the edge of the 5-lane thoroughfare surrounded by strip development. No normal person feels safe riding anywhere on that thing, especially during rush hour. It actually undercuts the message, by allowing opponents to argue that no one uses bikes anyway it's just a waste of time. I'd rather there be no bike lanes than expensive yet futile ones.

JW...Read a little history on American cities and train transport. The reason train travel fell out of favor with Americans has nothing to do with "waste"  or no demand for it. It has to do with the fact that certain Federal policies expedited the demise of mass transit as a means of promoting car travel. In fact passenger rail travel was a viable modes of intercontinental travel for the average person up until the 1960s. Air travel didn't take over intercontinental travel until then. Air travel became cheap after enough airlines were in operation to lower costs for the average person to use air travel. Amtrak suffers because it's underfunded because certain politicians loathe any funding for viable rail transport for eastern seaboard travel.

You act as if rail travel in Europe ends at the borders of each country. Not so. Each country has it's own system but there is also operational cooperation between countries for rail travel. And compare the landmass of Europe to the US is a red herring. It has to do with political and lobbying efforts to promote car and highway projects. en.wikipedia.org/.../General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

It isn't a question of using trains for every single trip but instead having multi-modal means of transport to give the average American (even those living in the 'burbs) a choice outside of the car trip for daily commuting, running simple errands, or travel between states for specific events.

No one is implying that we ban the car but that the manner in which the lopsided funding of Federal Transport dollars are used needs to be reevaluated to improve the quality of life instead of designing everything around the frickin' car.

jwl,

You're taking an all-or-nothing approach that is rather meaningless. Of course people might drive to a train station. The point is that by collecting folks from all directions, and allowing them to drive short distances to a hub at which they join a more efficient mode of transportation, you greatly decrease congestion and waste. Obviously this will not work for everyone. There is no such solution. Appropriate planning and public policy involve finding a variety of methods and combining them into a whole that is more effective overall than any one approach. Automobiles do not work for everyone, nor do planes, but we integrate them into a more effective whole. Trains are part of that integrated picture.

Amtrak is a joke, but not for the reasons you cite. It is run about as poorly, inefficiently, and absurdley as a rail system can be run outside the 4th World, yet people still use it. It has, in fact, undergone ridership increases in six consecutive years. Much of that growth is happening in the Northeast Corridor, the one place where Amtrak IS somewhat efficiently and effectively run, the one place where it DOES implement many of the policies and frameworks being advocated here. If something is run poorly, that is an argument for doing it better, not for stopping it. Would you advocate ending all highway monies because the current highway system is not being maintained? We ought to take the successful ACELA model and begin extending it to inter-city networks across the country, replacing the out-dated "slow airliner" model that national Amtrak is still using.

Your paragraph on Europe is also a joke.

" With their national GDP, of course they can cover the land with train tracks.  They have to, they cannot have cars all over the road or there'd be mass traffic jams.  "

Hmm, just like us. Maybe if we had real rail service, we wouldn't have quite so many traffic jams? And last I checked, the US was a pretty darn big economy that could easily afford such things if it wanted to. Also, our population density along many coastal and city areas is comparable to much of Europe's, and in those areas a similar approach is justified.

"Western Europe has no land mass at all; countries are the sizes of American states. "

A quick Google reveals the following stats:

Chicago - Detroit = 230 miles

London - Paris = 213 miles

Chicago - MStP = 360 miles

Paris - Berlin = 540 miles

Paris - Rome = 687 miles

Chicago - NYC = 714 miles

How exactly would a high-speed rail network between these American cities not be competitive with the comparable ones in Europe? It could be argued that the European cities are larger and thus have more population pressure to fill the trains, but no one's arguing that we need the sheer number of trains between, say, Paris and Berlin. You could implement a fraction of the European density and still serve the population effectively.

Also, are you forgetting that 60 years ago we DID have a national rail network equivalent if not equal to Europe's? That trains routinely travelled at speeds unheard of for Amtrak today? Seventy years later, our rail service is closer to that of 1900 than 2000. We have let it lapse, but its effectiveness and relevance is not diminished by our negligence.

One of the big problems Amtrak has is that in many places they do not own their own tracks, they lease them from other railways.  This means their tarins have lower priority.

If a high speed railway was built from Chicago to New York,  700 miles using a train that travels at about 200 miles per hour (which are common in Europe), you are looking at about  three and a half hours of travel time - and that's from city center to city center.  It would probably take longer by plane, once you factor in getting to the airport, going through security, etc.

wyllie,

In all fairness, my numbers were as the crow flies. If our hypothetical rail line followed the water level route between Chicago and NY, along the Great Lakes and down the Hudson, it's closer to 1,000 miles. At 200 mph, that's five hours. Even adding a couple hours for station stops and whatnot, that's pretty damn competitive, especially when, as others have noted, you factor in the hours of wait and delay at airports on either end.

Amtrak owns virtually none of its track outside the Northeast Corridor. Ironically, higher gas prices can make things worse for Amtrak, because shippers are increasingly turning to freight rail because it it far more efficient. The boom in freight rail traffic makes congestion worse, and dimishes Amtrak's capabilities. Unlike air or highway, freight rail recieves little government support, and operates on a far more free-market setting than either of the others.

Until the post-WW2 era, passenger trains were given priority in dispatching along virtually all railroad lines, ensuring that they kept their speed and time. Now, though the law technically requires the private railroads to do the same, it rarely happens. Part of this is pure physics. On a congested rail line, it is far easier and more efficient to repeatedly stop and start a short, light passenger train while allowing the mile-long coal drag to maintain a constant speed than to do the reverse. This is why it is so important to build more rail infrastructure to ease the congestion that creates much of the problem in the first place. Freight railroads are actively upgrading their infrastructure just to carry their own booming haulage, but they have little incentive currently to provide for passenger rail in their plans.

literatehobo:  I kind of figured that was the direct distance.  But still, five hours from city center to city center would not be bad.  The route could go through Detroit and Cleveland too.  It would need to be a dedicated line though and there can't be any level crossings either in order to run the trains that fast.  A quick look at Orbitz reveals that there are over 70 direct flights between those two cities every day, so there is lots of demand.   The average flight time looks like it's around two and a half hours - tack on an hour on either end to get to/from the airport, and hour extra time to get through security and a train is very competitive, even on a 1000 mile trip.  Plus on the train you can stretch your legs and walk around, hang out in the bar car, sit facing your travel companion (s).

Other options include Chicago - Detroit -Toronto - (Montreal) or maybe Chicago, Indianapolis, Cincinnati,   (Lexington, Knoxville), Atlanta and of course up and down the east coast Boston to Washington and San Fran - L.A. San Diego.

In the column that Dayo references below, Paul Krugman says: Still, if we’re heading for a prolonged

Robert Reich makes a good point in his column on public transit today. With gas at $4 per gallon, more