America needs passenger rail

Opinion

[3 Comment(s)]

By Jonathan Specht

President Obama recently unveiled his plan for bringing high speed passenger rail service to the U.S. The proposal includes a Gulf Coast corridor connecting Houston and Mobile, by way of Baton Rouge, and service from New Orleans to Washington, DC. This plan is great news for America, but is only the first step towards necessary changes in how we get from place to place.

My grandpa likes to tell a story about rail travel a century ago. When his father, a farmer in rural Iowa, had a recurring minor health problem, he would visit a doctor in Chicago. Why go so far for a small problem? Because he could hop on a train to Chicago from his small town in Iowa and be there and back within a few hours.

The moral of the story, as my grandpa says, is that traveling by train then was easier than traveling by car now.

It's easy to forget that we used to have comprehensive passenger rail service in America, both between and within cities. Then, in the 1950s, cheap gas, a booming economy and the new Interstate Highway System made rail unfashionable. Americans embraced the individual freedom that car ownership brought and started building far-flung suburbs so automobile-dependent that they didn't even have sidewalks.

Rail travel languished to the point at which it could only survive with government subsidies, and cities like Atlanta and Los Angeles grew to giant size without having any real public transportation. Today, as writer James Howard Kunstler has said, "The United States has a passenger rail system the Bulgarians would be ashamed of."

We didn't seem to mind until about 2005, when gas prices started rising. When gas hit $3 a gallon, people who commuted 80 miles per day between suburbs like Wentzville, Missouri and cities like St. Louis (especially with 13-mile-per-gallon Ford Expeditions) started to realize that the automobile can be enslaving as well as liberating.

Today, although gas prices are low for the time being, many Americans have realized that total car dependency is unsustainable. Now is the time to bring back passenger rail, before gas prices go back over $3 a gallon - and don't kid yourself, they will. As President Obama said in unveiling his proposal, high speed rail service will take pressure off both our airports and highways, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

In the past year, my views on the car have changed for two reasons. First, in traveling around the U.S. visiting law schools, I discovered that cities like Seattle, Philadelphia and Washington, DC have public transportation systems that are cheap, fast and easy to use. Second, my car died. Rather than immediately getting a new one, I decided to try living in Baton Rouge without a car for one semester.

Needless to say, it has not been easy. Baton Rouge is a fundamentally car-dependent city, and trying to get anywhere on our inadequate bus system can eat up an entire day.

While passenger rail service and metropolitan public transportation are different issues, they're strongly connected. After all, people who want to get to a city without driving will probably want to get around it without driving as well.

That's why Obama's proposal, while important, doesn't come close to solving our transportation issues. We need to get serious about passenger rail between cities and public transportation within cities, before the next oil price jump.

Originally Published: Issue 762 - April 22, 2009

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