In the nineteen thirties American passenger trains were the wonder of the world: beautiful, fast, fuel-efficient, inexpensive to ride and enormously profitable. In 1929 the Congressional made the trip from New York to Washington in three and a half hours, for an average speed of 65 miles per hour--the same time that it takes today. That’s like saying that eighty years later, we’re still driving Model Ts on dirt roads. For their part, Europe and Japan seized on American rail technology when rebuilding their countries after the war, and the rails now capture some forty per cent of all their inter-city travel. Their trains have speeds of up to 200 miles per hour on their now ubiquitous rapid rail, which will soon be superseded by magnetic levitation trains with cruising speeds of 260 mph.
At that rate an express train from New York to Washington or Boston would take an hour; from Pittsburgh to Chicago two; from L.A. to San Francisco an hour and a half; from Philadelphia to Cleveland two; from Phoenix to San Diego an hour and a half; from St. Louis to Kansas City an hour; from Cincinnati to Atlanta two--all from port to port downtown. It would provide these services at a far lower cost per passenger mile than either cars or planes, and with a fraction of the energy and pollution. Every year we suffer the casualties of another Vietnam War to brave the highway carnage at sixty miles an hour, when half of that travel could be handled in perfect safety at three or four times that speed by trains.
Now imagine if railroad technology had been this advanced in 1958: its speed, economy, and environmental cleanliness might well have had us building an interstate rapid rail instead of an interstate highway system. True, our cities would still have grown collars of suburbia, and occasional parkways and freeways would still have connected them to their cities and the cities to each other; but the job of hauling people and goods around the country would have mainly been done by rail. More than a hundred million people would have escaped injury, and perhaps a million people spared death on the highways. Our five per cent of the world’s population would consume more like a twenty per cent of its gasoline, which could thus be produced from our own resources. The countryside would remain recognizably the same to that of the eighteenth or nineteenth century: rural populations would concentrate in small hamlets crossed by country roads and in larger towns with railroad stations. And much of the investment spent urbanizing the hinterlands in the past half century would have been spent instead on the cities, which instead of declining might have flourished in ways inconceivable.
To continue in this imaginative vein, what if Congress, instead of declaring war on Iraq in 2003--to bring the blessings of democracy to that suffering people at a price of, well, at least a trillion dollars, a half million dead, 2 million refugees and a 50 year military occupation--what if they instead had declared a rather less risky moral equivalent of war on our disastrously bungled transportation system, with the idea of saving through efficiency all the gas that we’re now importing from the Middle East?
We’d still have spent the trillion dollars: about $33 million a mile for thirty thousand miles of a state-of-the-art interstate rapid rail system. But instead of the continuing trials of war, which have already tripled the cost of the very commodity that we went to war to control, we’d have a transportation system that would again be the envy of the world, that would incidentally, in its very use, work to solve the issues of oil, pollution, urbanization, highway danger, and loss of rural habitat. If this work had commenced in March 2003, we’d be riding those rails today, driving down the price of oil with every passenger mile. Assuming that Congress isn’t corrupt, dysfunctional, or in the pocket of some nefarious plutocracy, you can hardly argue that it failed to act because it couldn’t find the money, when we’ve just elected to spend a trillion dollars on a war of choice. The problem must rather be a simple lack of understanding and a corresponding failure of the will.
The United States opened a federal Highway Trust Fund in 1956, and an Airport and Airway Trust Fund in 1970, but, alone among industrialized countries, it does nothing for rails, aside from a pittance for local subways. If the past half century can teach us anything, it’s that rails must have parity with cars and planes if we’re going to use them at all. The railroads still own the right-of-ways, connecting every city center in America to each other. In a fully built up country, the potential value of such transportation corridors makes one think that they might as well be paved in gold. The government could support the building of the new rail system by either subsidies or tax incentives--just as it supports the highways and the airports--and monitor the proper balance among the three. Airports could then be connected by trains to inner-city rapid rail terminals, and trains could take over the bulk of inter-city transportation in the one to seven hundred mile range. Half of the burden on our highways would disappear if that were the case.
Most importantly, the gravitational fiscal pull of the port would eventually return and prevail in this scenario, as it has through all of civilized history. If Philadelphians lived a half-hour from Washingtonians, not only would the worlds of Philadelphia and Washington be open to each other in ways that were never possible before; the benefits of the new alliance would be greatest for those who lived closest to the terminals. Multiply this one example by thousands of people for each city in the system, and the damage of the past half century would quickly begin to heal. The hierarchy of land values would re-emerge, and our nation would begin to attract the adornments of civilization again. Fiscal gravity is easy to observe wherever its simple conditions are met: in Clarendon, Virginia, for example, where an inner suburb in terminal decay was transformed into a vibrant new city by nothing more than two subway stops with maximum density zoning at their exits.
Rome didn’t have to fall. It might have survived, or survived a lot longer, if it only possessed the means to identify and address its own decline. One of the proudest achievements of Rome was the aqueduct system that brought clean, fresh water down from the mountains and into the city that once in antiquity held two million people. But the channels of the aqueducts were stone, and the joints between them were made of lead. So this great engineering triumph slowly, inexorably, infected its very beneficiaries, who soon showed the telltale signs of poisoning by lead: dullness and stupidity. The Romans had no way to know this; they just got dumber and dumber without knowing why. It remained for the archeologists of another time to discover that.
There’s no excuse for that to be our fate. The consequences of a portless transportation system may have been hard to predict, but they’re easy to understand in retrospect. Of the four modes of modern transportation--air, water, road, and rail--America uses only three, having abandoned the railroads, humanity’s most efficient mode of transportation. In this it stands alone among advanced economies, like Britain, Germany, France and Japan, who have all assimilated highway grids without letting them ruin their cities or bankrupt their rails. They must wonder how we plan to stay competitive without them. Transportation isn’t just a part of civilization: at a certain fundamental level, it is civilization.
For heaven’s sake, bring back the trains.
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