America needs passenger rail

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.”

Tiger Weekly