While applauding Obama's support for high-speed inter-city rail, we should be thinking along much more local lines if we truly want to develop the green, efficient, fast, and friendly transportation system of the future. I suggest two infrastructure foci that together can take millions of cars off the road while getting people where they need to go more quickly, and with less hassle, than the current state of affairs.
Below the fold: Ring Rail to bring commuters around the cities, and Brainy Buses to get them to their doors...
Ring Rail is the concept of building light rail systems that connect the dots around cities, rather than forcing people to use their cars if they live in one suburb and work, shop, or study in another. Most urban rail and metro systems are built to get people to the center of an urban hub, which is useful if you happen to work in a main downtown area. However, a great many people who live in the suburbs have little or no business in the center of their metropolises. Instead, they need to commute 10 or 20 or 40 miles to another point on the periphery. Current public transport systems do nothing for them.
Ring Rail would create a spider's web of trains around each city. Lines would continue to run from the outskirts to the center of town, from several different points of the compass. What Ring Rail would add would be train lines running in concentric circles at several distances from the urban center. A commuter who needed to go from one suburb to another would easily move between the rings and the spokes, without having to deal with highways and traffic jams.
Most cities already recognize the benefits of transportation rings - and have build highways for drivers to avoid their downtowns. Anyone who has ever sat in traffic on [insert your favorite belt highway here] will agree, though, that increased automobile traffic has outpaced our ability to build highways. Fortunately, those ring roads have created a network of public right-of-ways (rights-of-way?) that can be exploited for rapid development of Ring Rail. Plenty of planning considerations, such as environmental impact research and land use planning, mean that Ring Rail is not "shovel ready" for 2009 - but it could be a major focus of development for the next decade and beyond.
A related concept is Brainy Buses. A light rail system is great for connecting the major dots, but commuters still need a way to get to and from the train station. Brainy Buses can make that link fast and easy, while eliminating kiss-and-cries and crowded parking lots.
Brainy Buses would work by knowing who their passengers are and where they are going. Picture walking off your train at the end of the day and sliding a card through a slot. Embedded in the card is your address. When all the passengers from the train have scanned their cards, a little screen on your card tells you, "You are on Bus 6." You walk to Bus 6, which is filled with people from your immediate neighborhood. A computer has figured out the most efficient route to get everybody home, and uses GPS to tell the bus driver where to drive and where to let folks off. You get dropped close to your door - no car, no traffic, no parking.
The morning commute would be similar. The Brainy Bus would know what train you want to be on, and would send you an email or SMS telling you what time to be at your nearest pickup point. How quickly could you get used to getting a beep, strolling out your door, and walking onto your bus a minute later?
Of course, Brainy Buses could exist at both ends of the commute, so it would be as easy to get between the train and the office as it is to get between the train and home.
Both Ring Rail and Brainy Buses can be built with existing technology, without any upheavals in the way people live. Yes, they would require investment, but they can be built incrementally over a number of years. What is required first is a recognition that we can solve our urban and suburban transportation problems with a coherent approach that gets us beyond the car.
And if that isn't enough of a pitch, here's one final thought: Ring Rail and Brainy Buses can easily connect to high-speed inter-city rail, for those who are fixated on that as the wave of the future...