Working on the Railroad

In the 19th century, American railroads were the engine of rapid industrialization and growth, bringing new Americans and their attendant prosperity to far-off corners of the then-unsettled country. American passenger trains carried millions of new soldiers to their training depots and their ports of call during the two World Wars, and, until the expansion of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, rail travel remained the only reliable and affordable method for traversing the country. But, since then, American passenger rail has steadily declined in both prestige and ridership; in 1971, the federal government effectively bought out the dying industry under the aegis of the taxpayer-backed firm Amtrak.

Today, the vast majority of Americans travel by either car or airplane, depending on the distance of their journey. This has contributed to our debilitating dependence on foreign oil and has made our transportation system lag behind others in the developed world, as countries like South Korea, France, Taiwan, and Spain have invested heavily in relatively efficient, fast, and safe high-speed trains that connect major metropolitan areas. Even China, the world’s largest developing economy, is making strides in this area—one can now take a high-speed bullet train from Pudong airport to downtown Shanghai in less than 20 minutes.

But change may soon be coming to America. On Thursday, President Obama outlined a proposal that would revitalize the passenger rail network of the United States by providing $8 billion in funding from the recently passed $787 billion stimulus package for high-speed rail networks, especially along the Northeast Corridor. We applaud the president’s bold maneuver and hope to see him follow through on his lofty rhetoric with real change in the way that the federal government treats the entire issue of high-speed rail travel.

Compared to the interstate highway system and the massive network of domestic airlines, high-speed rail is more energy-efficient and less costly per mile and provides an easy, efficient, and safe method of transportation. As such, we believe that a new national program of high-speed rail construction will be a worthwhile investment in infrastructure and job creation in the midst of the worst recession in more than two decades. In addition to the immediate benefits of job creation in the construction industry, the expansion of passenger rail travel will also provide jobs far into the future across the country.

Of course, building a viable system of high-speed rail lines is far easier said than done. Critics of Amtrak, the government-owned corporation that currently administers America’s aging and inefficient passenger rail system, have correctly pointed out that the current system is not only unprofitable, but also horrendously mismanaged. Moreover, ticket prices remain prohibitively expensive on the only real high-speed network in the country, the Acela Express that runs between Washington and Boston.

As such, for high-speed rail to become a viable form of mass transportation in this country, any new initiative must be a truly competitive alternative to the dominant automotive and airline industries. Amtrak’s poor track record has given rise to the false assumption that American culture is somehow incompatible with mass transit or railroads; this is absolutely false. Poor management practices should be remedied by decisive action—for starters, President Obama ought to encourage private industry to cooperate with Amtrak by offering tax breaks for those firms willing to cooperate on the proposed renovation plan for the Acela.

While there is no doubt that this is a challenging task, encouraging trends have emerged in recent years. Just one day after Obama’s speech, the governors of eight Midwestern states sent the president a letter urging him to support a new proposed plan that would connect Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, and Madison, Wisconsin with a network of fast passenger trains. And, while, Amtrak’s trans-continental lines may be the object of ridicule, ridership on the Acela line has grown rapidly as fuel prices have made air and car travel less attractive to business commuters. We hope that new plans for high-speed rail expansion will build on this progress and make American rail travel a viable option once again.