I have mixed feelings about high-speed rail. I’m for it, but I’m also a realist about the United States. And I see regional passenger service restoration as a way to build support for the big projects.
The US has a vast network of rail track that used to support passenger trains and is now used only for freight. The Housatonic Berkshire Line is one of many, but probably the best example in the country of a line that offers excellent return on investment.
In any case, we appreciate all politicians who pay attention to rail. Rep Seth Moulton, who is challenging our friend Senator Ed Markey in the Democratic primary, is one of them. Here’s his pitch, pulled from a recent podcast interview:
Let’s talk about affordability, affordable housing. You connected to high-speed rail. Come on, there’s no other place you’re going to get to nerd out on quite as great detail as this. So talk about how you tie those two things together.
Well, let’s bring it home to Massachusetts. You know, Massachusetts, we’ve got Boston, the whole Boston economy out east. But then we got the amazing city of Springfield that’s about two, two and a quarter hours away by car without traffic. But according to the current plan to improve the existing rail service between Boston and Springfield, it’ll be two and a half hours longer than driving to get there by train. Now, this is actually longer than the trains took in 1950, which is insane. And so what I’m just saying. How does anybody come up with that? Honest to God. It’s crazy. It’s totally crazy.
And yet, you know, that’s what the senator I’m running against supports. I’m just saying, let’s do what the rest of the world is doing. And we know that Japan does it. We know that France does it. How about the fact that Morocco does it? Morocco has one third the GDP of just Massachusetts, and yet they just completed a high speed rail line. that’s just a little bit longer than Boston to Springfield goes almost 200 miles per hour and that would mean getting from Springfield to Boston in 40 minutes. That would be transformative for the economy of Springfield but it would also be transformative.
And I’m going to push you to go further because sort of like New York State needs it. But, you know, there are some plans that would say, you know, do Boston is Chicago. you know they’re right I mean there are there are more ambitious plans.
So Boston to Chicago 20 years ago would have been considered a little bit too far for high-speed rail but given how difficult and aggravating it is to travel by plane these days distances like that are now in the high-speed rail market share now no one’s talking about taking a high-speed train from Boston to Los Angeles I mean that that would take quite a while um you know we’re talking about 24 hours or something like that and so most people wouldn’t take it although there would be some who really don’t want to fly or just really want to see the country.
But the point is that when you look at all these different markets across America where high-speed rail does make sense, not just Boston to Chicago, but Chicago to Atlanta. Chicago to Atlanta is about the same distance as the most popular high-speed rail line in the entire world, Beijing to Shanghai. And what’s amazing about these lines is that that’s not just good for the economy of Chicago or the congestion at O’Hare or the economy of Atlanta and the congestion at that airport. It’s good for all these amazing cities in between that feel very left out right now, because it’s great for Indiana.
You know, it’s great because all these, all these, the middle America states. So the point is, if you put all these different corridors on a map that makes sense for high-speed rail across America, you get a national system. Not because a lot of people will take the train from Boston to LA, but because Boston to Chicago makes sense, and Chicago to Omaha makes sense, and Omaha to Salt Lake City makes sense, and Salt Lake City to Los Angeles makes sense.
And so is the connection to affordable housing then essentially that you increase the radius of where people can live and it’s much cheaper to live in Springfield? Incidentally, this would be great for the NBA Hall of Fame, Basketball Hall of Fame. But is that how it connects or is there a development component you could see as well?
Yes, I mean, that is correct. That’s sort of the first level. The second is that a lot of people love being able to live in a place where they can walk to a train station and get, you know, amazing places very quickly and easily. And not only faster than driving, but often a lot nicer than driving and certainly way nicer than flying. And so you get a lot of housing that gets developed not through taxpayer subsidies but just through the private sector all around these train stations across America it also decreases regional inequality um because we all know that like let’s go to Boston Chicago right we all know that the economy of Chicago is thriving the economy of Boston is is thriving Syracuse South Bend Indiana Buffalo not so much but all of a sudden those those cities are included in this and that’s the Buffalo and Syracuse have great futures if they had something like this I mean they’ve got great futures but I agree with you it’d be transformative it’d be totally transformative and when you just have a highway and airport based system as we do today you leave Syracuse Buffalo South Bend Indiana they get left off the map because you just can’t get there fast enough or the airlines don’t serve them. That’s what’s so transformative about high-speed rail. It reduces regional inequality at a time when it’s been exacerbated with our latest economic trends.
Here’s the whole podcast. The discussion about trains is at 35:33.
As gas prices rise, here’s an idea from bigger cities. Could something like this work in our smaller cities and towns?
As more commuters look for smarter alternatives to driving alone – especially with return to office and increasingly congested traffic – slugging has re-emerged as a highly-effective form of commuting smarter, not harder. While it may be unfamiliar to some, slugging has been a long-standing transportation option in DC. Learn more about what slugging is, how it works, and how you can get started on your slugging journey.
This video is about slugging, or “casual commuting,” in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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