Epiphany

Open letter to the President Elect Part II

Mr. President Elect of all the industrialized countries the United States is the only country without high speed rail system. Could the reason be the same one that killed the very 1^st New York subway? Back in 1870 Alfred E Beach had build the 1^st pneumatic subway system under Broadway from Warren Street to Murray Street albeit secretly hoping to bypass the corrupt Mayor of the City, William Marcy Tweed aka “The Boss”. When the story broke of the new invention and travel underground The Scientific American (also edited by Beach) proclaimed, "This means the end of street dust of which uptown residents get not only their fill, but more than their fill, so that it runs over and collects on their hair, their beards, their eyebrows and floats in their dress like a vapor on a frosty morning, such discomforts will never be found in the tunnel!" The Boss was worried that his profit would take a beating (like the stocks today) since every trolley car company in the city paid tribute to him. The Boss worked hard to kill the subway with much success and the trolley car companies were happy. A century later the same would seem to be true, why is it that the US is the only industrialized country without a high speed rail? Could it be that the big car companies (like the trolley companies) have killed every effort to connect cities with high speed rail system? Yes would be the answer, how do we fix that would be the next question to ask. To help stimulate the economy, as I had stated in my earlier letter to the President Elect we need to open a bid for GM (which killed the electric car EV-1, its ghosts are coming back to haunt GM… good luck), Ford and Chrysler to build high speed electric train cars with the winning company getting grants and loan guarantees from the government, as my uncle always told me, “…there is no free lunch in America” We can compete with Eurostar as well as Taiwan, Japan and South Korea rail systems.

The inside of the cars should exceed the comfort of airline and bused, since the airline have been taking space away from the passage the train should start giving that space back. The inside should look, if not better than the following

Currently it takes anyway between 25 to 30 hours to travel from NJ to FL by train, as everyone knows we are a country on the move and in such a hurry, and we have a week of vacation for those of use who afforded it. But we are not willing to spend two days of travel just to go to FL. If we were to cut that travel time to 4 hours at a reasonable price then we would have more travel and competition between rail and air and we would see the airfares coming down, capital market would start rolling again unhealthy companies would not depend on the government for bail outs. In my travel I have met people who are afraid of planes, and they would rather take the buses which are even worse than train in terms of time travel from point A to B. These people hardly visit relatives or students who are out of state in college. Students traveling back and forth to school could enjoy the comfort of turbulence free ride to school even when the weather of no conducive for flying. We would be about to clear congestion in the airport in event of bad weather passage would be booked on trains to destinations if they miss their last flights due to weather or mechanical problems.

While the big three are bidding and building these electric cars states should start laying tracks. We should have a greater network than Europe and Japan combined. As the following figures shows Europe’s capital are all almost connected by high speed trains, we should be able to connect all the state capital with high speed as well.

This map shows high speed trains only, the red lines are trains that travel above 155 mph while the blue lines show speed of between 111-155 mph. just fyi European and Asian trains are twice as fast as American.