High Speed Rail

I think High Speed Rail makes a lot of sense from both an economic and environmental standpoint. The age of cheap air travel will be undone by increasingly expensive oil (despite the recent respite due to most of the world's economies collapsing, Peak Oil the price is on a permanent uphill climb. The map below is the Obama Administration's vision for where the routes will be:



My understanding is that, done right, the downtown-to-downtown travel time is often competitive with air travel. Los Angeles is about 300 miles away from San Francisco. The actual flight time is about 45 minutes or so; however, if you add to that the time you spend driving to San Fran airport, finding parking, going through security, getting to your gate - and doing all that in reverse at LAX - and high-speed rail might actually be quicker.

UPDATE: Joe Biden explains further:

What we're talking about is a vision for high-speed rail in America. Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city. No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. (Laughter.) Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination. Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America.

Now, all of you know this is not some fanciful, pie-in-the-sky vision of the future. It is now. It is happening right now. It's been happening for decades. The problem is it's been happening elsewhere, not here.

In France, high-speed rail has pulled regions from isolation, ignited growth, remade quiet towns into thriving tourist destinations. In Spain, a high-speed line between Madrid and Seville is so successful that more people travel between those cities by rail than by car and airplane combined. China, where service began just two years ago, may have more miles of high-speed rail service than any other country just five years from now. And Japan, the nation that unveiled the first high-speed rail system, is already at work building the next: a line that will connect Tokyo with Osaka at speeds of over 300 miles per hour. So it's being done; it's just not being done here.

There's no reason why we can't do this. This is America. There's no reason why the future of travel should lie somewhere else beyond our borders. Building a new system of high-speed rail in America will be faster, cheaper and easier than building more freeways or adding to an already overburdened aviation system –- and everybody stands to benefit.